How to Prepare for General Awareness - Awards, Medals, Prizes - Part I

In exams, the probability of a question on Nobel Prizes is reasonably high. Having said that, it would be a waste of time to go through the entire list. It would make a lot more sense if you looked at the past couple of years and / or Indian winners.

Given below is a list of Nobel Prize Winners for 2011 / 12

Indian Nobel Prize Winners

Given below is a list of Nobel winners from India or those who have some connection with India.

Booker Prizes

Year	Author	Title	Comments
1969	P. H. Newby	Something to Answer For	First
1971	V. S. Naipaul	In a Free State	Indian Connection
1981	Salman Rushdie	Midnight's Children	Indian Connection
1982	Thomas Keneally	Schindler's Ark	Basis for film
1992	Michael Ondaatje	The English Patient	Basis for film
1997	Arundhati Roy	The God of Small Things	Indian
2002	Yann Martel	Life of Pi	Basis for film
2003	DBC Pierre	Vernon God Little	Basis for film
2006	Kiran Desai	The Inheritance of Loss	Indian
2008	Aravind Adiga	The White Tiger	Indian
2009	Hilary Mantel	Wolf Hall	United Kingdom
2010	Howard Jacobson	The Finkler Question	United Kingdom
2011	Julian Barnes	The Sense of an Ending	United Kingdom
2012	Hilary Mantel	Bring Up the Bodies	United Kingdom

In 1993 to mark the 25th anniversary it was decided to choose a Booker of Bookers Prize. Three judges chose Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (the 1981 winner) as "the best novel out of all the winners.”

A similar prize known as The Best of the Booker was awarded in 2008 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the prize. A shortlist of six winners was chosen and the decision was left to a public vote. The winner was again Midnight's Children

Pulitzer Prize

Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established in 1917 by provisions in the will of American (Hungarian-born) publisher Joseph Pulitzer, and is administered by Columbia University in New York City.

Gobind Behari Lal won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1937.

Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her book "Interpreters of Maladies" in 2000.

Geeta Anand was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for her work on Pompe Disease, a muscular condition, which was made into a movie, "Extraordinary Measures", and later a book, "The Cure".

Siddhartha Mukherjee won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 2011 for his book, "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer".

I hope you enjoyed this post and hopefully you will be able to better in CMAT because of this. In my next post, I would cover other important awards like Bharat Ratna, Padma Awards, Ramon Magsaysay Awards, etc.

- Ravi Handa

(Ravi Handa, an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur, has been working in the CAT Prep sector for the past 7 years.)