Writer, performer and vocalist Amit Chaudhuri’s book Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music has won the coveted James Tait Black Prizes, Britain’s longest-running literary award.
The winners were announced on Wednesday by author and broadcaster Sally Magnusson at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Finding the Raga… won the prize in the biography category. The book explores the author’s intricate and intimate relationship with Hindustani classical music.
Chaudhuri said he felt honoured to be on such a remarkable shortlist.
“The prize is Britain’s oldest literary prize, and one that I have known of since I was a teenager. How could I not have, when past winners in fiction include D H Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Muriel Spark, and biography winners include Lytton Strachey, Doris Lessing, and John Carey? I owe something in particular to the judges for widening the category of ‘biography’ to include works combining memoir, reflection, and imagination — again, a tribute to the prize’s evidently unique catholicity of temperament,” Chaudhuri said.
Biography judge Simon Cooke of Edinburgh University called Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music “a work of great depth, subtlety and resonance, which unobtrusively changed the way we thought about music, place, and creativity”.
“Folding the ethos of the raga into its own form, it is a beautifully voiced, quietly subversive masterpiece in the art of listening to the world,” he said.
Chaudhuri, a poet, essayist, singer and composer, has received several accolades. Laurels for his fiction include Commonwealth Writers Prize, Betty Trask Prize, the Sahitya Akademi Award.
The writer has also won the West Bengal government’s Sangeet Samman for his contribution to classical music.
