The Immortal King Rao

"Finalist"

"The Immortal King Rao was more than a decade in the making. Braiding three connected stories and as many genres into a capacious narrative, journalist Vauhini Vara gives us a generational saga of a Dalit family in South India, the birth and rise of Silicon Valley and a speculative dystopia of shareholder governments. Whether she’s exploring the past or near future, Vara’s keen journalistic skills reveal aspects of post-independence India, the diasporic immigrant life, tech-driven hierarchies, climate change and more in ways that prompt questions about our present realities. The most important one, perhaps, is this: “What if I told you your social capital depended almost entirely on the privilege you were born with, not any effort of your own?”"