Humanities – Literary Studies

The Infosys Prize for Humanities - Literary Studies is awarded to Professor Amit Chaudhuri for his imaginative and illuminating writings in literary criticism, which reflect a complex literary sensibility, and great theoretical mastery, along with a probing sense of detail. The Infosys Prize recognizes and celebrates the intellectual reach and the quiet humanity in his extraordinary writings.

AmitChaudhuriis is the Professor of Contemporary Literature at University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K.

Jury citation:Prof. Chaudhuri’s writings in literary criticism reflect a complex literary sensibility, and great theoretical mastery, along with a probing sense of detail. These virtues are powerfully manifest in his highly original reading of D.H. Lawrence. He steered past the routine interpretations of Lawrence to a sober yet startlingly illuminating postmodern and even postcolonial understanding of his poems.

His personal and intellectual engagement with Tagore’s works, recast a widely familiar corpus of writing, and placed it in a dialectical relation with a long tradition of Western thought and literature.

These accomplishments have been steadily supplemented with a series of thoroughly engaging reviews of Indian and English literature, all done with an eye alert to subtle connections between critical theory, literary text, and cultural context.