Celebrating Voices, Shaping Futures

Each October, as the foothills of the Himalayas turn misty and Dehradun readies for the changing season, another tradition takes root — one that has nothing to do with weather or landscape, and everything to do with imagination. The Valley of Words (VoW) Book Awards, now in its ninth edition, have grown into a touchstone for Indian literature, a gathering where language, history, and creativity meet under a common canopy.

This year’s REC-VoW Book Awards 2025 mark more than just a list of eight distinguished winners; they mirror the shifting tides of Indian publishing itself. With over 600 nominations from 75 publishing houses across the country, the awards were judged by last year’s winning authors and translators, ensuring that writers themselves shaped the choices. The result: a list as eclectic as it is representative, ranging from children’s books to explorations of cannabis culture, from Hindi fiction to reimagined translations.

Among the winners are Karan Madhok’s Ananda: An Exploration of Cannabis in India, a provocative examination of a plant that sits uneasily between sacred tradition and legal taboo, and Lakshmi Murdeshwar Puri’s Swallowing the Sun, an English work of rare lyricism. In Hindi, Sudhir Vidhyarthi’s Bidaai De Ma! and Soni Pandey’s Suno Kabir bring together the resonance of rooted storytelling with the urgency of lived realities. Translation, increasingly recognised as the bridge across India’s vast literary landscape, finds representation in Banibrata Mahanta’s rendering of Lavanyadevi and Sulabha Kore’s Bahattar Meel. On the younger side of readership, Neil Flory’s charmingly titled Cactus Wants a Hug and Kripa’s art is a voice capture both playfulness and depth.

Festival Director Dr. Sanjeev Chopra described this year’s winners as emblematic of a simple truth: “the personal is the political.” These works, he noted, deal with identity, cultural memory, and social change — not in abstraction but through characters, stories, and images that readers can carry into their everyday lives.

What distinguishes VoW from other literary prizes is not just its breadth but its setting. Hosted in Dehradun at Hotel Madhuban on October 25–26, the festival blends scholarship with intimacy. Its volunteer-driven nature makes it less about spectacle and more about substance. Since its inception in 2017, VoW has sought to create a pan-Indian platform that resists the metropolitan gravity of Delhi and Mumbai, anchoring instead in the Himalayas — symbolic of resilience and rootedness.

The awards are more than recognition; they are interventions in cultural discourse. By honouring translations alongside original works, by foregrounding children’s writing as seriously as adult fiction, VoW signals that literature is not a hierarchy but a continuum. In the larger canvas of India’s literary festivals, often critiqued for chasing celebrity over craft, VoW remains a reminder of what literature at its best can do: start conversations, bridge silences, and imagine futures.

As the winning authors take the stage in Dehradun next month, they will not just be receiving citations and cheques of one lakh rupees. They will be joining a tradition that believes books are not passive objects but living voices. Voices that argue, remember, resist, and heal. Voices that — in a fractured and noisy world — remind us that words still matter.