COMING SOON!
2025 Deodar-BLF Prize Anthology

Featuring the best ten stories from the third edition of the Deodar prize, this anthology is a collection of sparkling voices from different parts of India.

Winner and Runners-up

Winner

Shantanu Anand

For 'A Sort of Homecoming'

Shantanu Anand wrote his first short story when he was 10. 23 years later, he still loves writing. He co-founded a poetry collective, Airplane Poetry Movement, worked in the performance arts space for 5 years with Kommune and Spoken Fest, and currently works with a media company, Yuvaa, which has the mission of making important things interesting. Last year, he took a 6-month sabbatical to write the first draft of his first novel, Kid For A Day.
 

 

Runner-up

Linthoi Ningthoujam

For 'Rice Cooker'

Linthoi Ningthoujam is a poet and writer from Imphal. Her poems have been published in various literary anthologies and journals, including The Penguin Book of Poems on the Indian City, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2022, and Witness: The Red River Book of Poetry of Dissent. Her fiction for children was published in Regional Stories of India 2 by Scholastic. ‘Rice Cooker’ is her first story for adults. She works as an assistant professor of English in Imphal.
 

 

Runner-up

Varnika Yertha

For 'Mr. Rao Jumps in '

Varnika has a decade of experience in data analytics and supporting strategy for user-facing platforms. While writing has always been a way of processing life, she is finally devoting time to write for an Other - a real reader. This will be her first published story.
 

 

Special Mentions

'Embankments of Memory'
Naitri Derasari
'Red Bananas'
Porvika Bala

Shortlist 2025

'Tiger, Tiger'
Annika Taneja
New Delhi

'Marsala and Marginalia'
Srividya Sivakumar
Coimbatore
 
'Embroidery And Other Homely Virtues'
Subhadra Chatterjee
Gurgaon
 
'The Red Bananas'
Porvika Bala
Chennai
 
'To Be the Home of a Storyteller'
Ishita Jain
Garli
'Falls'
Jyothi Vinod
Bengaluru
 
'Mout'
Zahanat Zahoor
Baramulla

'Rice Cooker' 
Linthoi Ningthoujam
Imphal
 
'What We Were'
Nadia Nooreyezdan
Delhi
 
'Embankments of Memory'
Naitri Derasari
Ahmedabad
'A Ritual for One'
Parvati Mohan
Hyderabad
 
'Phoron for the Forgotten'
Sharon Aruparayil
Dubai
 
'Coins In the River'
Shivani Sharma
New Delhi
 
'Mr Rao Jumps In'
Varnika Yertha
Hyderabad
 
'We Had No Words for This'
Ifaam Bashir
Srinagar
'The Back Seat Boys'
Debabrata Sahoo
Bhubaneshwar
 
'Tomorrow'
Rafaa Dalvi
Mumbai
 
'One Pestilence'
Santosh Saligram
Bengaluru
 
'A Sort of Homecoming'
Shantanu Anand
Mumbai
 
'Anamika'
Kartikeya Shekhar

Jury 2025

Anjum Hasan

Anjum Hasan is the author of the novels History’s Angel, The Cosmopolitans, Neti, Neti and Lunatic in my Head, and the short story collections A Day in the Life and Difficult Pleasures. She also has a book of poems called Street on the Hill. History’s Angel recently won the Mumbai LitLive! and FICCI Fiction Book of the Year awards.

 

Rohit Vedprakash

Rohit Vedprakash is a creative producer with a career spanning over 20 years across film, streaming series, and advertising. Having worked at premier studios like Walt Disney India, UTV, and Fox Star Studios, his feature film credits include Maqbool, Mangal Pandey, Slumdog Millionaire, Fitoor, and Lootcase among others. Rohit also worked at Netflix India and was involved in setting up 13 Netflix Originals, including Season 2 of the acclaimed series, Delhi Crime, along with a host of popular ones such as Mismatched (Seasons 1 and 2), Khakee, The Fame Game, Killer Soup and Kohrra.

 

R Sivapriya

R Sivapriya has worked in trade publishing for fifteen years. Her one consistent focus over the years has been literary translations from various Indian languages and periods of history. She is now Publisher of literary fiction and nonfiction at Bloomsbury India.