The Betty Trask Award is given to a debut novel by authors below the age of 35 who reside in a current or former Commonwealth nation. Desmond Elliot Prize is also awarded annually to the best first novel.
Mumbai-born writer Anjali Joseph has bagged two top literary awards for her critically-acclaimed debut novel Saraswati Park -- the Betty Trask Award and the Desmond Elliot Prize.
Both the awards carry a cash prize of 10,000 pounds.
The Betty Trask Award is given to a debut novel by authors below the age of 35 who reside in a current or former Commonwealth nation. Desmond Elliot Prize is also awarded annually to the best first novel.
"We were united in our admiration for Saraswati Park, which we found utterly absorbing and faultlessly written. The characters are beautifully rendered, and their lives, with their ambitions and regrets, stay with you long after you have closed the last page. Anjali Joseph's skills as a novelist are humbling," said BBC Radio 4's Edward Stourton, chair of judges for the Desmond Elliot Prize.
Joseph's book narrates the story of Saraswati Park, a housing complex in a Mumbai suburb and two of its empty-nesters, Mohan and Laxmi Karekar, whose lives are humdrum.
Elliptical and enigmatic, Saraswati Park is a book about love and loss and noise and how, in spite of everything, life, both lived and imagined, continues in Mumbai, according to publishers HarperCollins India.
In an enclave in Mumbai, Mohan, a middle-aged letter writer - the last of a dying profession - sits under a banyan tree in Fort, furnishing missives for village migrants, disenchanted lovers, and when pickings are slim, filling in money order forms.
Mohan's true passion is collecting second-hand books; he's particularly attached to novels with marginal annotations. So when the pavement booksellers of Fort are summarily evicted, Mohan's life starts to lose some of its animating lustre.
At this tenuous moment Mohan - and his wife, Lakshmi -are joined in Saraswati Park by their nephew, Ashish, a diffident, sexually uncertain 19-year-old who has to repeat his final year in college.
Joseph, who was a former commissioning editor of Elle magazine India, was described by The Times as "a latter-day Mrs Gaskell".
The Observer described Saraswati Park as "an elegantly realised portrait of unrequited love, frustrated aspirations and the unspoken compromises of marriage and family".
The Daily Telegraph selected Joseph as one of its "Top 20 novelists under 40" alongside other outstanding emerging writers such as Zadie Smith and Adam Foulds.
Joseph's career has encompassed teaching and office temping, as well as spells as a trainee accountant and in journalism. After reading English at Trinity College, Cambridge, she went on to teach at the Sorbonne.
She is now working on her second novel, which will have a setting in three cities - Paris, London and Mumbai.
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