The Bengali poet, author, playwright, painter, and bona fide polymath Rabindranath Tagore provided a wonderful, lyrical definition of the short story in his 1892 collection of poems ‘Sonar Tori’ (The Golden Boat). It goes like this: “ছোট প্রাণ ছোট ব্যথা, ছোট ছোট দুঃখ কথা / নিতান্ত সহজ সরল / সহস্র বিস্মৃতিরাশি প্রত্যহ যেতেছে ভাসি / তারি দু-চারটি অশ্রু জল / নাহি বর্ণনার ছটা ঘটনার ঘনঘটা, নাহি তত্ত্ব নাহি উপদেশ / অন্তরে অতৃপ্তি র’বে, সাঙ্গ করি মনে হবে / শেষ হয়ে হইল না শেষ.” It is a delightful poem, ostensibly written on a rainy day (‘borshar dine’), which defines the short story as an intimate, emotional, and focused narrative that avoids heavy plots or grand, philosophical conclusions — one that highlights small, personal experiences and leaves the reader with a lasting, unfulfilled feeling.

Tagore should know. He was one of the pioneers of the short story form in India. Although South Asia had a long and rich tradition of oral storytelling, it wasn’t until the arrival of the printing press in the 20th century that, through cross-pollination with English, French, German, and Russian literature, the modern short story form truly arrived in the region. Since then, writers across Indian languages — such as Munshi Premchand, Saadat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chughtai, Kamala Das, and more recently, the 2025 International Booker Prize winner Banu Mushtaq — have made the form their own.

Since 2023, the Deodar Prize — founded by Harvard alum Natasha Joshi — has been looking for what comes next. The annual prize seeks to recognise “new themes and voices in literary fiction in India”, inviting Indian citizens over 18, whether living in India or abroad, to submit an unpublished short story in English of up to 2,500 words.

The winner receives ₹1 lakh and publication in The Bombay Literary Magazine, while two runners-up receive ₹25,000 each, editorial feedback, and an offer of publication in Hammock Magazine. Previous winners include Srividya Tadepalli for ‘Funeral for a Demon’ in 2023, Ateendriya Gupta for ‘The Pilgrim’ in 2024 and Shantanu Anand for ‘A Sort of Homecoming’ in 2025. Winning and shortlisted stories are also collected in print anthologies, available through select bookstores such as Champaca in Bengaluru, Fictionary in Mumbai, and Kunzum in Delhi.

But for Joshi, the prize is about more than finding individual writers. It is also an attempt to understand what Indians are writing when they are given an open space to write without being told what kind of story is supposed to matter. 

“There’s a huge diversity when it comes to what people are writing, and I think that’s incredibly exciting,” Joshi says. “When we look at the saturated, algorithmically driven media ecosystem, we can start to feel like there’s only one type of cinema, content, or writing that’s really doing well, and everybody has to fall in line with it. You can even start to fall for a particular mono-aesthetic because that’s what platforms push audiences towards. But when you have an open call like ours, you get stories from all over India, including really small towns, and you start to see how differently people want to express themselves and the kinds of stories they want to tell — sometimes immense stories, sometimes small moments written in immense ways. I think what I’ve learned is to really believe in the voice of contemporary India and Indians who want to write and express themselves.”

“People of all ages are writing. In fact, over half of our stories come from people above the age of 35. Perhaps that makes sense because writing can also be a way of processing your life and, as you get older, a way of making meaning,” Joshi says. “We receive stories from people in their 60s and 70s, but it’s equally exciting to see the very unique and original expressions coming from younger writers. Writing as a form of expression seems to be remarkably age-agnostic.”

Running a Prize with such a broad mandate in a volatile literary landscape is certainly no easy task, and Joshi is very candid about the difficulties involved in sustaining this enormous effort. “I would say the biggest challenge is finding the right team,” she says. “People who share the prize’s values and believe passionately in literature and the arts, but who are also readers with evolved taste and a wide engagement with writing and culture. Finding people who are the right fit for that vision is always difficult. At the same time, there’s an immense need for much more patronage of contemporary writing in India. There are so many areas in which Indians are writing and exploring, but we don’t yet have a strong architecture of support for them. We’re trying to figure out how Deodar can support that ecosystem while also imagining what the platform could become.”

Joshi is also keenly aware of the AI question when it comes to literary prizes, especially after the winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Short Story Prize, Jamir Nazir, was accused of using AI in his prize-winning short story, ‘The Serpent in the Grove’, earlier this year. “We’re still in very early territory with AI and the creative industries, and I think the truth is somewhere between the idea that AI will completely disrupt creative work and the idea that it’s inherently flattening and boring,” Joshi says.

“The more likely reality is that people are augmenting their own thinking and expression with AI,” she says. “For us as a prize, the immediate question is whether AI-detection software is reliable enough to distinguish human writing from AI-generated writing. I don’t think it is. The last thing you want is a false positive that eliminates genuinely human writing. So, for now, I think the question isn’t whether someone has used AI, but whether the writing is good or bad. And that’s where having a strong, experienced jury becomes critical. Our jury process is highly discursive — we sit and talk for hours about the shortlisted stories. I have a lot of confidence in the jury’s ability to recognise strong, original writing. At the moment, I also don’t think AI-generated creative writing has reached a point where it can sustain a longer piece with the kind of depth, movement and coherence that we look for. That’s where we are right now, but it’s certainly a question that prizes will continue to grapple with.”

The winner of the 2026 Deodar Prize will be announced in October.

Follow @thedeodarprize on Instagram to learn more.

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