Indira Goswami India

The Prince Claus Awards Committee regards Indira Goswami as an outstanding writer, who reveals how ordinary people experience reality. Her powerful and lively descriptions and memorable images show how the body is central to human affairs, how political, religious and cultural systems affect the body and how the body determines life processes, gender, age, poverty and conflict. Indira Goswami is a woman of letters, who specialises in Assamese and Ramayana literature. She was first a professor and later the head of the Institute for Modern Indian Languages and Literature at Delhi University. With others she translates her books into English and is active in translating literary works from English to Assamese and vice versa. Goswami is a courageous woman and an intellectual who never hesitates to fight publicly for various disadvantaged groups. Through her involvement in the recent peace talks in Assam, she has contributed to an attempt to solve a conflict that has cost some 10,000 lives. Indira Goswami (also known as Mamoni Raisom Goswami) is a woman of unique insight and strong convictions; she was honoured with the Principal Prince Claus Award because of her work’s inimitable quality, and because she recognises and describes how cultural values are imposed and attributed to the body. Moreover, she deploys her literature as a means of effecting social and cultural change. 

2008 Awards Book here.