Siddhartha Sarma (
Assamese: সিদ্ধাৰ্থ শৰ্মা) is an
Indian novelist and journalist from
Assam who writes in English.
Biography
Siddhartha Sarma is from
Guwahati,
Assam.
While working as a journalist for a business magazine in Delhi, he published the young adult novel ''The Grasshopper's Run'' with
Scholastic
Scholastic may refer to:
* a philosopher or theologian in the tradition of scholasticism
* ''Scholastic'' (Notre Dame publication)
* Scholastic Corporation, an American publishing company of educational materials
* Scholastic Building, in New Y ...
in 2009.
To write the novel, he conducted archival research and incorporated stories he was told by his grandfather.
The story is set in
Assam and
Nagaland during the
Second World War and follows the friendship between a
Naga and
Assamese
Assamese may refer to:
* Assamese people, a socio-ethnolinguistic identity of north-eastern India
* People of Assam, multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic and multi-religious people of Assam
* Assamese language, one of the easternmost Indo-Aryan language ...
boy.
recommended the book, and it won the 2010
Vodafone Crossword Book Award
The Crossword Book Award (formerly known as the Crossword Book Award (1998–2003), the Hutch Crossword Book Award (2004–07), the Vodafone Crossword Book Award (2008–10), the Economist Crossword Book Award (2011–13), Raymond & Crossword Bo ...
in the Children's Literature category.
In 2011, Sarma was awarded the Bal Sahitya Puraskar for ''The Grasshopper's Run'' by the
Sahitya Academy
The Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters, is an organisation dedicated to the promotion of literature in the languages of India. Founded on 12 March 1954, it is supported by, though independent of, the Indian government. Its of ...
.
He has also written ''East of The Sun'', a travelogue published in 2011 based on his travels in the
North East
The points of the compass are a set of horizontal, radially arrayed compass directions (or azimuths) used in navigation and cartography. A compass rose is primarily composed of four cardinal directions—north, east, south, and west—each sepa ...
, and emails he sent to friends to describe his journey.
In 2018, he published the novel ''Year of the Weeds'', which is based on the
Dongria Kondh campaign against mining.
In 2019, he published the non-fiction book ''Carpenters and Kings: Western Christianity and the Idea of India'' after nine years of research on a concept he developed while completing his thesis for a
Master of Letters at the
University of Glasgow.
His next novel, titled ''Twilight in a Knotted World'',
was released in September 2020.
[Reviews of ''Twilight in a Knotted World''
*
*
*] In 2021, his work was published in the essay collection ''Where the Gods Dwell''.
See also
*
Indian English Literature
*
Literature from North East India
Literature from North East India ( as, উত্তৰ-পূৱ ভাৰতৰ সাহিত্য, mni, Awāng Nongpok Bhāratkī Loinasinlon) refers to literature in the languages of North East India and the body of work by English-lang ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sarma, Siddhartha
Indian male journalists
Writers from Guwahati
Indian male novelists
English-language writers from India
Novelists from Assam
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people)
Journalists from Assam