Mistry's Guggenheim

Celebrated novelist Rohinton Mistry has received the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship for the year 2005 in recognition of his distinguished literary output. He is among five Indian Americans who share the US$ 7,112,000 award along with 181 other men and women of merit, notes a report of the Press Trust of India forwarded by Behram Pastakia of Washington DC. Designed to give scholars and artists the flexibility to pursue creative endeavors across a wide array of disciplines, the Foundation has dispersed almost US$240 million in fellowships to over 15,500 individuals since 1925, adds the report.

Made into a movie with the same name, Mistry’s novel, A Fine Balance, won him the Giller Prize, The Royal Society of Literature’s Winfried Holtby Prize and the Los Angeles Times Award for Fiction in 1996. Mistry’s first novel, Such A Long Journey, had received the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book in 1991 and had been short listed for the Booker Prize. It has also been made into a movie.