It’s been a long, difficult journey: Booker longlisted author Avni Doshi
It’s been a “long and difficult” journey spread over seven years and eight drafts, says author Avni Doshi , whose novel “Burnt Sugar”, about a torturous mother-daughter relationship, has been longlisted for the 50,000 pounds Booker Prize 2020 along with 12 others, admitting she was moved to “tears” when receiving the news and has thanked the jury for “deeply” engaging with her work. “The journey has been long and difficult, to say the least,” Doshi, who lives with her family in Dubai, told IANS in an email interview. It goes back to 2013 when she won the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize at the 2013 Kolkata Literary Festival for new unrecognized talent with an unpublished manuscript. She started working with a literary agent but realized that the book “was in no way ready to see the light of day” and began “revising it, playing with the perspective, the form and the tone”. “I was lucky enough to do a writing fellowship at the University of East Anglia in the UK, and it was there that I sa