Rollo Romig’s “captivating account” of Gauri Lankesh murder is Pulitzer finalist
A book investigating journalist Gauri Lankesh’s assassination has become a Pulitzer Prize finalist. The Board called ‘I Am on the Hit List: A Journalist’s Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India’, written by American journalist Rollo Romig, a “captivating account of a crusading South Indian’s murder, a mystery rich in local culture and politics that also connects to such global themes as authoritarianism, fundamentalism and other threats to free expression”.
The book follows the investigation into Gauri Lankesh’s death, and is equally an inquiry into her life and the social and political background it played out in. Nominated in the ‘General Non-fiction’ category, it lost to ‘To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement’ by Benjamin Nathans.
On 5 September 2017, the fierce journalist and activist Gauri Lankesh was assassinated outside her home in Bangalore, leaving the city’s close-knit community of writers and activists stunned and grieving. A shocked nation reacted with spontaneous mass protests. Her murder and its aftermath continue to make headlines even years later, and her killers are yet to be brought to book.
A Penguin title internationally, it was released in India earlier this year by Context, an imprint of Westland Books.
In this book, Romig meticulously reconstructs the events leading up to the shocking murder of Gauri Lankesh, an outspoken journalist who became a symbol of resistance against fascism. The book not only chronicles the chilling details of her assassination but also examines the socio-political currents that enabled such a crime and its impact on India’s democracy and press freedom.
The book has been praised internationally for its bold storytelling and incisive commentary, making it a must-read for those invested in issues of press freedom, justice, and the fight against authoritarianism. Reviewing it for The Tribune, Prof Avijit Pathak had called it “a gripping commentary on the fragility of Indian democracy in the light of growing extremism and political disenchantment”.
Read the review here:
https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/book-reviews/a-journalists-killing-a-restless-metropolis-the-ideological-divide/
At the time of release, Ajitha GS, Publisher, Context, and Rollo’s editor, had said, “Rollo achieves so much with this extraordinary book: it’s a murder investigation that’s also an enquiry into the state of India; it’s a book about the life and death of Gauri Lankesh but equally about her murderers and the system that created and enabled them; in its enquiry of two other unconnected murders — surprisingly relevant detours — it is also a meditation on death and culpability; and in all this it doesn’t lose sight of Gauri and of other human rights defenders that are on the frontlines in the fight to save India’s democracy. It’s such an important book and an absolute page-turner.”
Born and raised in Detroit, Rollo Romig is a journalist, essayist, and critic. He has been reporting on South India since 2013. Speaking about his book at the release, he had said: “This book is a tribute to the India I love, and to those Indians who are defending it from the forces that want to narrow it into something rigid and homogenous and cruel. It’s also a celebration of one extraordinary and delightfully complicated Indian, Gauri Lankesh. To me the book’s central mystery is not who murdered Gauri but the question of how she managed to live so fully and touch so many different kinds of people. It’s a book about how to live a life, and writing it forever changed the way I live mine.”
The Pulitzer Prizes are given by Columbia University for achievements in the United States in “journalism, arts and letters”. The finalists for all awards are announced along with the winner.
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