Who among the following Indian novelists and journalists is/are part of the five member jury for the 2026 International Booker Prize ?
1. Natasha Brown
2. Kiran Desai
3. Nilanjana S. Roy
4. Rajni Chau

Question

Who among the following Indian novelists and journalists is/are part of the five member jury for the 2026 International Booker Prize ?
1. Natasha Brown
2. Kiran Desai
3. Nilanjana S. Roy
4. Rajni Chauhan
Select the correct answer from the code given below :
Code :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, only 3, Nilanjana S. Roy. She is the Indian novelist and columnist named to the five-member judging panel announced in 2025 for the 2026 International Booker Prize; the other confirmed members of that panel are the mathematician and writer Marcus du Sautoy, the translator Sophie Hughes and the writer Troy Onyango. Roy is the only Indian on it, which is exactly what the question is testing: it asks which of the listed 'Indian novelists and journalists' is on the panel, and she is a working columnist as well as a novelist, the author of 'The Wildings', 'The Hundred Names of Darkness' and 'Black River'. None of the other three names belongs on the panel. Kiran Desai was in the 2025 Booker news cycle as an author, not as a judge; Natasha Brown is a British novelist; and 'Rajni Chauhan' does not correspond to any member of the jury. Only statement 3 survives, so the code gives (b).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Nilanjana S. Roy belongs, but Kiran Desai does not. Desai is on the wrong side of the prize — she is a Booker author, not a Booker judge. She won the Booker Prize in 2006 for 'The Inheritance of Loss', and she was back in the 2025 Booker Prize news cycle as the author of the novel 'The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny'. That fresh publicity is precisely why the examiner planted her here.  (c) Statement 4 is a manufactured name. 'Rajni Chauhan' does not correspond to any member of the 2026 International Booker jury, and inserting one invented name beside one genuine one is a standing UPPSC device — it converts a question about a five-member panel into a test of whether you actually recognise the individual or are pattern-matching on plausible-sounding Indian names.  (d) Natasha Brown is a real and well-regarded novelist — the author of 'Assembly' — but she is British rather than Indian, and she is not among the confirmed members of the 2026 International Booker panel. The question's own wording, 'Indian novelists and journalists', is the hint that she does not fit.

Concept: The International Booker Prize is the translation half of the Booker family, and it is a different award from the Booker Prize proper. The Booker Prize goes to a novel originally written in English; the International Booker Prize is awarded annually for a single book translated into English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland, and its prize money of fifty thousand pounds is split equally between the author and the translator. In its earlier form as the Man Booker International Prize, before 2016, it was given once every two years to a living author of any nationality for a whole body of work — which is why older questions on it read so differently. Each year's winner is chosen by a small judging panel announced well in advance, and it was the panel for the 2026 prize, announced during 2025, that this question is drawn from.

State PCS 2025 Q108 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q108 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer