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Literary awards seek to bestow honour and recognition on outstanding pieces of literature. Over the years, Booker and Nobel have emerged as prestigious prizes internationally.

India too has its own brand of literary awards, which have gained international fame and recognition such as the Jnanpith, Sahitya Akademi, and the JCB Prize for Literature. Earlier this month, the long list of the 2021 JCB Prize for Literature was announced. The 10 novels on the long list were selected by a jury comprising author and literary translator Sara Rai, designer and art historian Annapuma Garimella, author and translator Shahnaz Habib, writer podcaster Amit Varma and journalist-editor Prem Panicker.

What is the JCB Prize?

India's richest literary prize, it was established in 2018 by the JCB Literature Foundation, which is run by the global manufacturer of earthmoving and construction equipment. The winner of the coveted award will receive Rs 25 lakh, and if it happens to be a translated work, the translator will get 10 lakh. The shortlisted authors also get Rs 1 lakh each and translators Rs 50,000.

Beginner's luck

This year’s long list consists majorly of debutant works such as "What We Know About Her by Krupa Ge and "Anti-Clock" by VI James. Malayalam writer S Hareesh had won the prize in 2020 for the translation of his novel "Moustache". In 2019, author Madhuri Vijay won for her debut novel The Far Field", while in 2018 the award went to Benyamin for his "Jasmine Days", a novel translated from Malayalam to English.

What's next?

The shortlist of the JCB Prize will be announced on October 4, while the winner will be declared on November 13.

THIS YEAR'S LONGLIST

• What We Know About Her by Krupa Ge
• "Anti-Clock" by VJ James (English translation by Ministry S)
• "Name Place Animal Thing" by Daribha Lyndem
• "A Death in Sonagachhi" by Rijula Das
• The Plague Upon Us" by Shabir Ahmed Mir
• "Gods and Ends" by Lindsay Pereira
• The Dharma Forest" by Keerthik Sasidharan
• "Asoca" by Invin Allan Sealy
• "A Soliloquy" by M Mukunda  translated from Malayalam by Fathima EV and Nandakumar K)
• “The Man Who Learnt to Fly but Could Not Land" by Thachom Poyil Rajeevan (translated from Malayalam by PJ Mathew).

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Trilogy, a series of three dramas or literary or musical compositions that, although each is in one sense complete, have a close mutual relation and form one theme or develop aspects of one basic concept. The term originally referred specifically to a group of three tragedies written by one author for competition. This trilogy constituted the traditional set of plays presented in Athens by a number of competitors at the 5th-century-BC drama festivals known as the Great Dionysia. One of the first authors to present such a trilogy was Aeschylus, whose Oresteia is the only surviving example from that time. Modern examples of trilogies include Robertson Davies’s Deptford Trilogy and Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy.

The term is less often applied to music, such as the Berlin Trilogy of David Bowie which is linked together by musical sound and lyrical themes, all having been recorded at least partly in Berlin, Germany.

The term is seldom applied outside art. One example is the "Marshall Trilogy", a common term for three rulings written by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall from 1823 to 1832 concerning the legal status of Native Americans under U.S. law.

Creators of trilogies may later add more works. In such a case, the original three works may or may not keep the title "trilogy".

The first three novels in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series were dubbed a trilogy, and even after he extended the series, author Douglas Adams continued to use the term for humorous effect - for example, calling Mostly Harmless "the fifth book in the increasingly inaccurately named trilogy."

Kevin Smith's films Clerks, Mallrats and Chasing Amy were often marketed as "The New Jersey Trilogy" because they had overlapping characters, events and locations. After the release of a fourth film, Dogma, the series is referred to as "the View Askewniverse".

The Star Wars Trilogy of three films released between 1977 and 1983 has since been expanded into a trilogy of trilogies, including the original trilogy, the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy released between 1999 and 2005 and the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy released between 2015 and 2019.

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Prequel, a literary or dramatic work whose story precedes that of an earlier-written work. For example, Lillian Hellman’s play Another Part of the Forest (1946) portrays the earlier lives of the characters she first wrote about in The Little Foxes (1939).

Like sequels, prequels may or may not concern the same plot as the work from which they are derived. More often they explain the background that led to the events in the original, but sometimes the connections are not completely explicit. Sometimes prequels play on the audience's knowledge of what will happen next, using deliberate references to create dramatic irony.

Though the word "prequel" is of recent origin, works fitting this concept existed long before. The Cypria, presupposing hearers' acquaintance with the events of the Homeric epic, confined itself to what preceded the Iliad, and thus formed a kind of introduction.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "prequel" first appeared in print in 1958 in an article by Anthony Boucher in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, used to describe James Blish's 1956 story They Shall Have Stars, which expanded on the story introduced in his earlier 1955 work, Earthman Come Home. The term came into general usage in the 1970s and 1980s

Rather than being a concept distinct from that of a sequel, a prequel still adheres to the general principle of serialization, defined only by its internal chronology and publication order. For example, Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999) is a prequel to Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi (1983) but is only a predecessor of Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002) because of the release order. Likewise, 1984's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is a prequel to 1981's Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, in that it is set in 1935, one year before the first film.

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A narrative may be an entire novel or a simple short story. Some narratives are divided into interrelated groups like the Canterbury Tales. Some narratives are larger and made up of both prose and poetic interludes; an example of this type of narrative is The Cremation of Sam McGee.

Many narrative poems are performance pieces. They hold oral traditions in which poetry was used as a way of memorization. The meter, alliteration, and kennings helps bards better remember the stories which were used to tell of traditions, the happiness of life, and life's deepest troubles.

There are four types of narrative verse:

Ballad

A poem similar to a folk tale which uses a repeated refrain. This means that every few stanzas a portion of the poem is repeated, much like a song.

Epic

A long, serious poem which tells the story of a hero. Think of stories like Odyssey or Ben-Hur.

Idyll

A poem about either an idolized country scene or about the heroes of yesteryear. This could also include the story of Odyssey, except for different reasons. An idyll speaks of someone or something in a way that it should be idolized. For example, today many stories of Ghandi or Martin Luther King, Jr. could be written about in an idyll. However, an even better example could be George Washington.

Lay

A long poem which was sung by medieval minstrels. The long poems generally were about the news of the day or historical facts they wished to be passed along throughout the countryside.

Credit : Poem of Quotes

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A manuscript was, traditionally, any document written by hand – or, once practical typewriters became available, typewritten – as opposed to mechanically printed or reproduced in some indirect or automated way.

The study of the writing in surviving manuscripts, the "hand", is termed palaeography (or paleography). The traditional abbreviations are MS for manuscript and MSS for manuscripts, while the forms MS., ms or ms. for singular, and MSS., mss or mss. for plural (with or without the full stop, all uppercase or all lowercase) are also accepted. The second s is not simply the plural; by an old convention, a doubling of the last letter of the abbreviation expresses the plural, just as pp. means "pages".

A manuscript may be a codex (i.e. bound as a book) or a scroll. Illuminated manuscripts are enriched with pictures, border decorations, elaborately embossed initial letters or full-page illustrations.

Most surviving pre-modern manuscripts use the codex format (as in a modern book), which had replaced the scroll by Late Antiquity. Parchment or vellum, as the best type of parchment is known, had also replaced papyrus, which was not nearly so long lived and has survived to the present only in the extremely dry conditions of Egypt, although it was widely used across the Roman world. Parchment is made of animal skin, normally calf, sheep, or goat, but also other animals. With all skins, the quality of the finished product is based on how much preparation and skill was put into turning the skin into parchment. Parchment made from calf or sheep was the most common in Northern Europe, while civilizations in Southern Europe preferred goatskin. Often, if the parchment is white or cream in color and veins from the animal can still be seen, it is calfskin. If it is yellow, greasy or in some cases shiny, then it was made from sheepskin.

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Fanfiction is a genre of amateur fiction writing that takes as its basis a “canon” of “original” material.

This original material is most often popular books, television shows and movies – but can expand to almost anything, from the lives of celebrities to the travels of inanimate objects like the Mars rover.

The main impulse behind fanfiction has always been a playful desire to engage with original works. Yet authors are still subject to modern copyright laws. In Australia, the US and the EU, copyright exists for the lifetime of the author plus seventy years.

Many early Disney film adaptations were derivative works based on out-of-copyright novels – think Alice in Wonderland (1951) and The Jungle Book (1967). In a way this could be considered a form of fanfiction.

Today, existing restrictions mean those interested in “remixing” copyrighted material create online communities to discuss and distribute their work freely. One of the aims of the fan-led Organisation of Transformative Works is to fight for the validity of fair use laws.

Still, the amateur status copyright law forces on fanworks is one of the reasons fanfiction as a whole is regarded with some derision.

This is one reason why the Twilight fanfiction origins of 50 Shades of Grey were obscured. Due to residual textual and thematic similarities, the question of copyright infringement remains open.

Credit : The Conversation

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