The Nominees for the Hutch Crossword Book Awards 2006-07 were announced in Mumbai on Wednesday. Predictably, some of the year’s bestsellers and much-talked about titles like Sacred Games (Vikram Chandra) and The Inheritance of Loss (Kiran Desai) led the list in the most popular category of ‘Best English Fiction’, while Penguin led the publishers’ tally with 10 titles in the shortlisted nominations.

Other nominees in the fiction category were Racist (Kunal Basu), Or the Day Seizes You (Rajorshi Chakraborti), Home (Manju Kapur), Londonstani (Gautam Malkani) and Bougainvillaea House (Kalpana Swaminathan)

Announcing the shortlisted nominees, Suketu Mehta, who won the Crossword Book Award for the best work in the English non-fiction category in 2005 for Maximum City: Bombay Lost & Found, said, “The list reflects the vitality of Indian writing.”

The English non-fiction shortlist has Vikram Seth’s memoir Two Lives competing with Two Men and Music (Janaki Bakhle), Amrita Sher-Gil: A Life (Yashodhara Dalmia), India’s Legal System: Can It Be Saved (Fali S Nariman), The Shaping of Modern Gujarat: Plurality, Hindutva and Beyond (Suchitra Seth) and Brideless in Wembley (Sanjay Suri).

Aniyan Nair, the head of operations and marketing, Crossword, said: “This year, we received 119 entries spread across the three categories of English fiction, English non-fiction and Indian language fiction translation. Amongst individual categories, non-fiction writing saw the maximum growth and participation with 61 entries.”

The nominees in the Best Indian Language Fiction Translation included In A Forest, A Deer (C S Lakshmi), The Man From Chinnamasta (Indira Goswami) and Kesavan's Lamentations (M Mukundan).