Bombay-born writer wins Literary Prize

[S Jain]

Extracts from _The Globe and Mail_ Nov. 8, 1995

MISTRY WINS GILLER FOR SECOND NOVEL

Author writes of India during turbulence of emergency
rule under Indira Gandhi

by Val Ross

TORONTO - Rohinton Mistry, 43, a Bombay-born writer now living in 
Brampton, Ont., has won the second annual Giller Prize for his novel 
_A Fine Balance, a complex and sweeping epic of modern India in the
mid-1970s, the time of Indira Gandhi's imposing of emergency rule.

Mistry, a former Governor-General's Award winner, received a cheque for
$25,000 as well as a 45-centimetre bronze statue by sculptor Yehouda Chaki.

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This year's winner...is Mistry's second novel. It was eagerly awaited 
after the spectacular success of his first (novel), _Such a Long 
Journey_, which won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the 1991 
Governor-General's Award for English-language fiction, as well as the 
Smith-Books/Books in Canada First Novel award. It was also short listed 
for Britain's Booker Prize.

In his new novel, Mistry returns to India, to the lives of two 
impoverished, low-caste tailors, a student and their widowed landlady 
Dina Dalal, as they try to hang on to their dignity, self-sufficiency 
and principles amid brutal upheaval.

The Giller Prize is Canada's most generous such award, offered 
specifically for fiction written in English....
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Sushil Jain