The winners are traditionally announced at the closing session of the Festival. Since the Festival is online again this year due to the continuing Covid-19 pandemic, the Awards Ceremony will be streamed on Sunday, 21 November.

The Shortlists in each category (in alphabetical order), and the eminent Juries that decided the Awards are as follows:

• Tata Literature Live! Book of the Year (Fiction) Shortlist (in alphabetical order):
  
  
  • Asoca: A Sutra by Irwin Allan Sealy (Penguin Random House)
  • China Room by Sunjeev Sahota (Penguin Random House)
  • Names of the Women by Jeet Thayil (Penguin Random House)
• Tata Literature Live! Book of the Year (Non-Fiction) Shortlist (in alphabetical order)
  • Born a Muslim: Some Truths About Islam in India by Ghazala Wahab (Aleph)
  • The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move by Sonia Shah (Bloomsbury)
  • Undercover: My Journey into the Darkness of Hindutva by Ashish Khetan (Westland)
• Tata Literature Live! First Book (Fiction) Shortlist (in alphabetical order)
  • A Bit of Everything by Sandeep Raina (Westland)
  • A Death in Shonagachhi by Rijula Das (Pan MacMillan)
  • Gods and Ends by Lindsay Pereira (Penguin Random House)
• Tata Literature Live! First Book (Non-Fiction) Shortlist (in alphabetical order)
  • Breathing Here is Injurious to Your Health: The Human Cost of Air Pollution and How You Can Be the Change by Jyoti Pande Lavakare (Hachette)
  • It’s All In Your Head, M by Manjiri Indurkar (Westland)
  • Landscapes of Loss: The Story of an Indian Drought by Kavitha Iyer (HarperCollins)
• Tata Literature Live! Business Book of the Year Shortlist (in alphabetical order)
  • Fossil Free: Reimagining Clean Energy in a Carbon-Constrained World by Sumant Sinha (HarperCollins)
  • Pandemonium: The Great Indian Banking Tragedy by Tamal Bandyopadhyay (Roli Books)
  • Spring: Bouncing Back From Rejection by Ambi Parameswaran (Westland)

Juries for the awards

Each award category is decided by an eminent jury. The juries for 2021 were as follows:

• Fiction
  • Arundhati Subramaniam: Poet, author, journalist and curator.
  • Githa Hariharan: Author, editor and columnist.
  • Shashi Warrier: Author, columnist and professor.
  • Vinita Mathew: Professor of English Literature, Wilson College, Mumbai
  • Shireen Mistry: Committee Member, Tata Literature Live!; communications professional
• Non Fiction
  • Amrita Shah: Author and journalist
  • Dilip D’Souza: Author and journalist
  • Nivedita Menon: Author, scholar, professor of Political Thought at JNU
  • Sanjay Johri: Independent director and former Managing Director of Voltas and Reader’s Digest
  • Tina Nagpaul: Committee Member, Tata Literature Live!; writer and filmmaker
• Business 
  • Arun Kumar: Chairman and CEO, KPMG India
  • Emmanuel David: Strategic Leader, Influencer and Coach; Former Director Tata Management Training Centre
  • Errol D’Souza: Professor of Economics and Director, IIM Ahmedabad
  • Shaili Chopra: Business journalist, author, entrepreneur and founder of SheThePeople TV
  • Shinjini Kumar: Corporate leader, entrepreneur and co-founder of SALT, a financial services app focused on women