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Khandu hails Bhupen Hazarika award winner Thongchi

By Correspondent

ITANAGAR, June 25 - Arunachal Chief Minister Pema Khandu has congratulated eminent writer from the State, Yeshe Dorjee Thongchi for being selected for the prestigious 5th Bhupen Hazarika National Award 2017.

�It is a proud moment for every Arunachalee and people of North East in particular that a retired bureaucrat, an eminent writer of all times has been unanimously selected for the prestigious award,� Khandu said in his congratulatory letter, terming it as a well deserved achievement.

Khandu said that this will definitely inspire the young writers of the State and North East and will instill new zeal and passion amongst the members of the literary society Thongchi leads.

The Arunachal Pradesh Literary Society also congratulated its president on being chosen for the award. �It is a bit of happy news for the members of APLS and people of Arunachal in general,� it said.

Thongchi started his literary pursuit from his childhood days. Although his mother tongue is Sherdukpen, a language hardly spoken by 6,000 people, he started writing in Assamese because it was then the medium of instruction in schools in North East Frontier Agency (NEFA), now Arunachal Pradesh. While his first poem called Jonbaai (The Moon) appeared in an Assamese children�s magazine by the same name in 1967, he tried his hand at various genres including plays, short stories and novels, excelling in all of them.

He has so far written about a dozen novels, and numerous short stories and plays, all in Assamese. His most important novel is �Mauna Onth Mukhar Hriday� (Silent lips, murmuring hearts) which won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2005. Another novel �Sav Kata Manuh� (The man who cuts corpses) vividly describes the tradition of how human bodies are ritualistically cut into over 100 pieces before disposing it off in to river. Many of his works have been translated into Hindi, English and other languages.

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