Rubbing shoulders with Mauzo’s Teresa’s Man and Other Stories from Goa are A Fistful of Earth and Other Stories by Siddhartha Gigoo, Passion Flower: Seven Stories of Derangement by Cyrus Mistry and Don’t Let Him Know by Sandip Roy in the long list.
A total of 90 collections of short stories from all over the world are on the list. The €25,000 prize is given to “the best collection of stories published in English for the first time anywhere in the world.” Named after short story writer Frank O’ Connor, it is also currently the world’s richest prize for a short fiction.
The 90-strong list will be whittled down to a shortlist of about six books in late May, with an announcement in June. The prize-winner will be revealed in July.
Mauzo writes about everyday people and their simple lives in his work. A helpless farmer who must sacrifice his beloved animals to survive through poverty, the parents of a differently-abled child and their efforts to put together a normal and embarrassment-free birthday celebration for him, a woman who is forced to concur with the wishes of her husband and mother-in-law are characters on which his stories weave around.
Translated from Konkani into English by Xavier Cota, the stories bring to light the nature of human relationships that change with time and the emotions and challenges that give rise to dilemmas of everyday life. Mauzo worked on the collection over several decades and the fiction is set in a Goa of the 1970s still untouched by commercial tourism.
