Team Blitz India
NEW DELHI: India-born author Nandini Das has been named the winner of the 2023 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. This leading international non-fiction prize is worth pound 25,000. Nandini’s book ‘Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire landed her this award.
The UK-based academic’s debut work, described as the “true origin story of Britain and India told through England’s first diplomatic mission to the Mughal courts”, was revealed as this year’s winner at a ceremony at the British Academy in London on October 31 evening.
As a professor in the English faculty at the University of Oxford, the 49-year-old author has sought to present a new perspective on the origins of empire through the story of the arrival of the first English Ambassador in India, Sir Thomas Roe, in the early 17th century.
“By using contemporary sources by Indian and British political figures, officials and merchants she has given the story an unparalleled immediacy that brings to life these early encounters and the misunderstandings that sometimes threatened to wreck the whole endeavour,” said Professor Charles Tripp, chair of the prize jury.
