Who is the winner of the prestigious 15th Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize? Mumbai-based writer Nikita Deshpande, announced a statement put out by the University of Hyderabad. Along with poet Sridala Swami and two faculty members of the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, these jury members went through about 120 entries before they selected Nikita Deshpande.

Meet the winner
Nikita Deshpande writes poetry, fiction and screenplays and has a BA in English Literature from St Xavier’s College, Mumbai. She is the author of It Must’ve Been Something He Wrote (Hachette, 2016), anthologies A Case of Indian Marvels (Aleph, 2022), and Magical Women (Hachette, 2019). She has contributed to films like Fukrey and Mirzya; Chai Chai, an animated series streaming on Amazon Prime in the US and The Big Day, a documentary series on Netflix. 

What is the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize?
An award for creative writing in India, it was instituted by the Hyderabad-based Srinivas Rayaprol Literary Trust and is jointly administered by the Department of English, University of Hyderabad. The award, consisting of a citation and cash prize of Rs 15,000 is presented to the winner at an event.

Previous winners:

Aditi Machado (2019) 

Hemant Mohapatra (2010)

Aditi Rao (2011)

Tushar Jain (2012)

Mihir Vatsa (2013)

Ranjani Murali (2014)

Aishwarya Iyer (2015)

Goirick Brahmachari (2016)

Debarshi Mitra (2017)

Poorna Swami (2018)

Prashant Parvataneni (2019) 

Satya Dash (2020)

Pervin Saket (2021)

Syam Sudhakar (2022)

Eminent poets like Jeet Thayil, Sudeep Sen, Keki Daruwalla, Arundhati Subramanian, Manohar Shetty, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Ranjit Hoskote, EV Ramakrishnan, Gieve Patel, Mamang Dai, Vinay Dharwadker, and Mani Rao have been the jury members.