Book Review Literary Trust announces winners of Short Story Contest

The Book Review Literary Trust announces 2025 Short Story Contest winners, celebrating literary talent at the Nikhil Chakravartty Memorial Lecture.

The Book Review Literary Trust has announced the winners of its second edition of the Short Story Contest 2025 on March 7. It was made on the occasion of the Fourth Nikhil Chakravartty Memorial Lecture held at the India Islamic Cultural Centre, Lodhi Road, New Delhi, in the presence of renowned intellectual Prof. Partha Chatterjee.

Mumbai-based writer Kartikeya Shekhar won the first prize for the short story titled “Anamika”. Amita Basu, fiction writer and cognitive scientist based out of Bengaluru, won the second prize for the story, “One-See-Are”. Juanita Kakoty, an author and academic from Delhi, secured the third spot for “Fusion of Horizons”. The winners will be awarded cash prizes of ₹10,000, ₹7,500 and ₹5,000 respectively.

The event and the contest were part of The Book Review’s 50th anniversary celebrations.

Since August 2025, several seminars on themes such as the significance of a book review in the literary and academic world, translation and children’s writings have been held across New Delhi and Bengaluru, with the fourth Nikhil Chakravartty Memorial Lecture being the final event in the series. The events were attended by literary and academic luminaries, the publishing fraternity and the general public.

The first edition of the contest was held in 2020. The winning entries then, along with a selection of the best contest entries, were published in book format, in a volume titled “The Thief’s Funeral: The Book Review Anthology of Short Fiction”, edited by Chandra Chari, Uma Iyengar and Sucharita Sengupta. The book was published by Aleph Book Company in 2024, and contains the works of authors such as Armaan Verma, Jobeth Ann Warjri and Madhulika Liddle.