DKM PRIZE 2022

CONTEST CLOSED FOR THIS YEAR

DEEPANKAR KHIWANI MEMORIAL PRIZE 2022

by The Quarantine Train

WINNERS

Announced on 30 April 2022 

 

Tuhin Bhowal

 

Tuhin Bhowal’s poems and translations appear or are forthcoming in adda, Parentheses Journal, Ovenbird Poetry, Poetry City USA, South Florida Poetry Journal, The Night Heron Barks, Bacopa Literary Review, and elsewhere. He currently serves as a Poetry Editor at Bengaluru Review, Sonic Boom Journal and Yavanika Press.

 

The jury commends Tuhin Bhowal’s poetry for revealing an admirable emotional intelligence that makes space for the fertile unarticulated. The best moments appear with beguiling simplicity. Structural craft and linguistic possibilities harmonise the haphazard and the sensible. Poetry, here, is both a ‘musical’ and a ‘silence’, voice and its negation.

 

Alishya Almeida — Second Prize

 

 

Alishya Almeida

 

 

Alishya Almeida (they/she) is a writer and educator from Mumbai currently based in the United States. Their writing has been published in Bellevue Literary Review, The World That Belongs To Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia, Gloom Cupboard, Leaf Garden Press, and Horror Homeroom.

 

 

The jury commends Alishya Almeida’s poems for exhibiting an expansive vision and the ability to look outward to escape the poet. With thematic consistency and attentiveness, these poems highlight the harassment of earth and dystopias of modernity. Spatiality is rendered hostile and the human is made to shrink into ‘the nightmare’ of its own creation.

Rhea Sharma – Third Prize

 

 

Rhea Sharma

 

Rhea Sharma is an author and copywriter from Dehradun, Uttarakhand. Her first novella Milky Tea & Vodka was published by Terribly Tiny Tales in 2020. Her work has also appeared in With Love published by Penguin India, Aster Lit Magazine, and Gulmohur Quarterly. She is currently living in Bangalore, complaining about the expenses but always thankful for the rain.

 

The jury commends Rhea Sharma’s structurally confident poems for bringing out themes of inherited violence with ‘stinging tenderness’. Memory invades the experiential, and time is made an asylum. The inward poetic gaze deftly transcends solipsism to build critical relationships with the world outside.

PRIZE CEREMONY

7.00 pm Welcome and Introduction
7.05 pm Report on The Quarantine Train
7.08 pm Deepankar Khiwani Memorial Oration by Martín Espada
8.00 pm Address by Arjun Rajendran, Founder & Curator, The Quarantine Train
8.10 pm Film on Deepankar Khiwani and his poems
8.20 pm Brief on the Adjudication Process by DKM Prize Chair
8.25 pm Address & DKM Prize Announcement by Arjun Rajendran
8.30 pm Winners Reading
9.00 pm Vote of Thanks
9.05 pm Open House

Guest of Honour

 

 

Martín Espada

 

Photo credit: Lauren Marie Schmidt

 

Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His latest book of poems is called Floaters, winner of the 2021 National Book Award and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Other books of poems include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006) and Alabanza (2003). He is the editor of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (2019). He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays and poems, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
http://www.martinespada.net/ 

eventvideo2022

 

SHORTLIST

Announced on 22 April 2022

  • Akshay Balan
  • Alishya Almeida
  • Basudhara Roy
  • Rhea Sharma
  • Tuhin Bhowal
  • Uttaran Das Gupta

 

LONGLIST

Announced on 18 April 2022

  • Akshay Balan
  • Alishya Almeida
  • Basudhara Roy
  • Diana Romany
  • Feby Joseph
  • Khushi Bajaj
  • Rhea Sharma
  • Tuhin Bhowal
  • Uttaran Das Gupta 

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

 

  1. All submissions should be sent to dkprize@thequarantinetrain.com between September 15, 2021 and December 15, 2021.
  2. Each entry should consist of 3 original and unpublished poems in English in a single document (doc or docx). A PDF may be attached additionally for preserving the formatting. Each poem should not exceed 40 lines. Personal blogs and social media posts will not be considered as published if removed from public access upon submission.
  3. Only one entry per individual is allowed. No simultaneous submissions. No translations. No revisions after submission.
  4. Submissions are read blind. No identifying information should appear on the document submitted for the prize.
  5. The covering email should have the subject line: Submission_PARTICIPANT NAME. The email body should contain a brief bio of less than 50 words and a proof of age and identity (Voter ID, Passport, or any other valid ID proof).
  6. The prize is open only for Indian citizens above 18 years of age. 
  7. Past and present members of The Quarantine Train and their close relatives, and previous winners are not eligible for the prize.
  8. Cash awards of INR 15000, 10000, and 5000 will go to the first, second, and third prize winners respectively. All three winners will also receive a one-year TQT membership and a certificate.
  9. There is no entry fee.
  10. Upon submission, participants agree to having their poems, if selected for the prize, published on blogs or social media.
  11. Queries can be directed to dkprize@thequarantinetrain.com
  12. The prize is scheduled to be announced on April 30, 2022.