Awards: Deborah Rogers Winner

University of East Anglia PhD student Deepa Anappara won the £10,000 (about $13,520) Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award for her "completely assured" novel Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, the Bookseller reported. The prize, founded in 2015 as a tribute to the late literary agent Deborah Rogers, "honors a first-time writer whose work shows literary talent but who needs support to complete their first book and includes fiction, nonfiction or short stories, but not poetry."

Chair of the judges Anne Enright said: "We care about these characters from the first page and our concern for them is richly repaid. This is storytelling at its best--not just sympathetic, vivid, and beautifully detailed, but also completely assured and deft. Set in the slumlands of a sprawling Indian city, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is a modern tale that works an ancient seam of the story-telling tradition. Not many writers can make it look this easy. What a privilege to be one of Deepa Anappara's early readers. There are many more to come."

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