Indian writer Ruthvika Rao wins £10,000 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize for ‘The Fertile Earth’

The winner of the 2026 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize is The Fertile Earth by Ruthvika Rao. She will receive a cash prize of £10,000.

The Prize celebrates the outstanding adventure fiction written in English by authors of any nationality and published in paperback in the UK. The winner was chosen by librarians and library staff, and by professionals whose work is between adventure and storytelling.

In The Fertile Earth, Vijaya and Sree are the daughters of the Deshmukhs of Irumi. Hailing from a lineage of ancestral aristocrats, their family’s social status and power over villagers on their land are absolute. Krishna and Ranga, brothers, are the sons of a widowed servant in the Deshmukh household. When Vijaya and Krishna meet, they forge an intense bond that is beautiful and dangerous. But after an innocent attempt to hunt down a man-eating tiger in the jungle goes wrong, what happens between the two of them is disastrous, with the consequences reverberating through their lives into young adulthood.

A review on Scroll said, “Rao’s prose brings alive the social hierarchies in the village of Irumi situated in the Eastern Ghats… The Fertile Earth captures a country in the throes of an explosive rise of violent Naxalite movements seeking to restore justice to a post-independent India plagued...

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