Siddhartha Sarma | |
---|---|
Born | Assam |
Language | English |
Notable works | The Grasshopper's Run East of The Sun Year of the Weeds Carpenters and Kings Twilight in a Knotted World |
Notable awards | 2010 Vodafone Crossword Book Award 2011 Bal Sahitya Puraskar |
Siddhartha Sarma (Assamese: সিদ্ধাৰ্থ শৰ্মা) is an Indian novelist and journalist from Assam who writes in English.[1][2]
Siddhartha Sarma is from Guwahati, Assam.[1] While working as a journalist for a business magazine in Delhi, he published the young adult novel The Grasshopper's Run with Scholastic in 2009.[1][3] To write the novel, he conducted archival research and incorporated stories he was told by his grandfather.[1][4] The story is set in Assam and Nagaland during the Second World War and follows the friendship between a Naga and Assamese boy.[5][6][7]
Nilanjana S Roy recommended the book,[8] and it won the 2010 Vodafone Crossword Book Award in the Children's Literature category.[5][9] In 2011, Sarma was awarded the Bal Sahitya Puraskar for The Grasshopper's Run by the Sahitya Academy.[10][11]
He has also written East of The Sun, a travelogue published in 2011 based on his travels in the North East, and emails he sent to friends to describe his journey.[12][13] In 2018, he published the novel Year of the Weeds, which is based on the Dongria Kondh campaign against mining.[14][15][16]
In 2019, he published the non-fiction book Carpenters and Kings: Western Christianity and the Idea of India after nine years of research on a concept he developed while completing his thesis for a Master of Letters at the University of Glasgow.[17][18] His next novel, titled Twilight in a Knotted World,[19] was released in September 2020.[20][21] In 2021, his work was published in the essay collection Where the Gods Dwell.[22]