First, a very big thank you to all our judges:
Samit Basu
Sarnath Banerjee
Jane Bhandari
Urvashi Butalia
Sampurna Chattarji
Devangshu Datta
Sonia Faleiro
Naresh Fernandes
Ranjit Hoskote
Marilyn Noronha
Manjula Padmanabhan
Jerry Pinto
Nilanjana S Roy
Arundhathi Subramaniam
Altaf Tyrewala
A huge thank you also to my colleagues at Caferati, Manisha Lakhe and Annie Zaidi, who with me, evaluated every single entry at the first stage, where the long lists were created, and then again, when the final round was being judged, across all the contests.
A big debt of gratitude to Megha Murthy, who designed and built the elegant judging system that made handling all those entries a very simple task (one groans at the memory of the time spent in past years collating, totalling and averaging entries), letting us give both contestants and jury extra time to do their thing. The system kept all personal information from entrants concealed from the jury, and did not let the jury members see what their colleagues were scoring. And then, at the end of it all, it totalled, averaged, shortlisted and presented us with winners.
Naturally, thanks ever so much, R Sriram and Shivmeet Deol, of the Literature section of the Festival, for your continued faith in us. It was, as usual, a pleasure working with you, and we look forward to future collaborations.
And last, and by no means least, thank you, every one of you, for your participation, for helping spread the word (we got around 400 valid entries across our contests, without a word of formal advertising), and for letting us know that we’re on to a good thing.
And now to the results.
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Poetry Slam
At the finals, at the David Sassoon Library Garden, after four rounds, each of which eliminated 3 participants, from a starting field of 12, the winners were:
1st:
Jane Bhandari
2nd:
Rohinton Daruwala
3rd:
Mustansir Dalvi
You can see the scoresheets, and read the entries for the initial elimination round here. Update: And the scoresheets from the live contest are here.
Graphic Flash
In our other new contest, we got a fairly limited number of entries, but some very nice work all the same.
The winners were:
1st
pratheek thomas, sachin somasundaran (collaboration)
2nd (shared)
Mahesh Murthy
Shiladitya Chakraborty
4th * (another tie):
Dinesh P, Aravindakshan P (collaboration)
Shiladitya Chakraborty
You can see all the winners here.
*Please note, there is no 3rd place. Since 2nd place was shared, Mahesh and Shiladitya share equally the prize money for 2nd and 3rd place. Winners of 4th place are being mentioned here because we think they deserve to be, but they do not win a prize.
You can see the scoresheets (and see all the entries) from the initial round and from the full jury here.
Flash Fiction
The winners were:
1st
Shiladitya Chakraborty
2nd
Asif Anis Khan
3rd
Shiladitya Chakraborty
You can see all the winners here.
You can see the scoresheets (and read all the entries) from the initial elimination round and the full jury session here.
SMS Poetry
The winners were
1st
Nandini
2nd
Sridala Swami
3rd (shared a 4-way tie!)
Minal Sarosh
Minal Sarosh
Swetha Prakash
Falstaff
You can see all the winning entries here.
You can see the scoresheets (and read all the entries) from the initial elimination round and the full jury session here.
In a day or three, I will be mailing all the prize-winners individually, to get your mailing addresses so we can send you your prizes. Pretty please, with sugar on it, do not mail us in the meanwhile; we need a bit of recovery time too! [Done!]
We had a grand time thinking up and bringing you these contests. We hope you’ll come back when we next have something to offer. In the meanwhile, we hope you’ll come look us up at our forum or our blog, and on our various newsletters and city groups (list on the right).
Until then, all the very best to you and your muse,
(with Annie and Manisha) Peter
