Easterine Kire wins Bal Sahitya Puraskar 2018

Our Correspondent
Kohima, June 23 (EMN): Noted Naga poet and author Easterine Kire has been selected for the Bal Sahitya Puraskar 2018 for her novel ‘Son of the Thundercloud.’
The award was announced by India’s national academy of letters, the Sahitya Akademi, after its executive board met on Friday in Guwahati. It has approved 23 writers of various Indian languages for the awarad. Kire was selected for the best author award in the English category.
When Eastern Mirror contacted the author after the announcement, she said to be surprised when a friend sent a message informing her about the award. “My publisher (Speaking Tiger) was totally surprised too as they knew nothing about it,” she said.
Talking about Son of the Thundercloud, Kire said, “This is a book very close to my heart. I wrote it around the folktale of a woman who lost her seven sons and their father. All the men in her life were killed by a tiger. And she was very sad, but one day a raindrop fell on her and she was impregnated and she gave birth to a baby boy who grew up and killed the tiger avenging his brothers and father.”
“I wove the story of the Christ-child into that basic tale we are familiar with and imagined the Christ-child growing up as a Naga boy, in a Naga village, playing with mud and catapults and being taught eternal things by his aunts and mother…. I try to understand loss of elderly relatives and I believe they go on to another place in another form. I believe they don’t die: they just shed their physical forms that are worn out. The miraculous plays a big role in the story because the story of Christ is about a miracle birth. People have so much trouble accepting the virgin birth, yet when our folktales say that a widow found a gourd that turned into a baby boy we have no trouble believing it,” the author shared.
On winning the award, Kire said, “I feel very grateful of course, very. And I am so pleased that a book I loved writing has found a home in other people’s hearts as well.”
The Bal Sahitya Puraskar, comprising a casket containing an engraved copper plaque and a cheque of INR 50,000, will be given away at a function on Nov. 14 2018.
Kire’s book had won the Book of the Year Award for fiction at the Tata Literature Live Awards 2017 too.