Good times are here for Nepali novelists writing in English. While Manjushree Thapa's recently launched book The Tutor of History, published by Penguin India, is doing brisk sales in Valley bookstores, Ohio-based Nepali writer, Samrat Upadhyay, just bagged the 2001 Whiting Writers' Awards. Given annually to the best emerging writers, Upadhyay and four other fiction writers, two poets, two non-fiction writers, and a playwright, received $ 35,000 each at a ceremony in New York on 27 October. Upadhyay's Arresting God in Kathmandu was released by Mariner Books/ Houghton Mifflin in July this year, the first fictional work by a Nepali author to be published in the west.