150+ Nominations. Ten books Longlist. One prize. INR 15 lakhs. Announcing the Longlist for the 9th Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize, honouring the finest non-fiction on Independent India’s history. From the making of the Constitution to the partition of a subcontinent, from the story of India’s development to the rise of its scam economy, from the life of a diplomat who shaped the Republic’s foreign policy to a diaspora's resistance to the Emergency, from the lives of migrant workers in a Delhi factory to a hidden maestro of Hindustani music, from questions of justice in the Republic to a personal history of the nation, these books reckon with the India we live in today.

This is our design for the newest reprint of a book that has been our list forever. We have designed so many covers for it over the years it was a challenge to come up with something new. We sent the initial design to the editor, the renowned poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, with some trepidation since we were suggesting an iconoclastic cover that had no connection with the old, very strong design by Neelima Rao, who had created a collage from portraits of writers. Arvind wrote back: "It was Pound who called the young poets of the 1930s like George Oppen 'strugglers in the desert' . The phrase came back to me when I saw the absolutely wonderful picture you'd chosen for the new cover. It couldn't have been more apt. The History ends just when the typewriters -- and fax machines -- were going out of business. I still have my Lettera 33; it's the first thing I bought when I stepped on American soil in October 1971. The Matt Artz photograph you've chosen continues to haunt. It gets the critical emptiness in which we all write, sitting on the edge of the desert, our laptops asleep or awake." The brilliant photograph is by @matt.artz. The cover design and concept are by Anuradha Roy.