Arundhati Roy’s Ministry of Utmost Happiness is one of the five finalists for the National Book Critics Circle of the US for 2017 awards for fiction. (AFP)

Arundhati Roy and Pakistan’s Mohsin Hamid are the two authors from the subcontinent to figure in the list of five finalists announced by the National Book Critics Circle of the US for the 2017 awards for fiction. While Roy has been named for her popular book The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Hamid made the cut for Exit West that deals with the issues of emigration and refugee crisis.

Both books, which were published by Penguin Random House India last year, are competing with Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour, Joan Silber’s Improvement and Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward for the coveted prize.

Pakistan’s Mohsin Hamid’s book Exit West, which deals with the issues of emigration and refugee crisis, is in the race for the award. ( Ed Kashi )

The National Book Critics Circle Awards, started in 1975 and considered among the most prestigious in American letters, are the sole prizes bestowed by a jury of over 1,000 working critics and book review editors. The awards will be presented on March 15 at the New School in New York City.

The finalists in the non-fiction category are: Jack E Davis’s The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea, Frances FitzGerald’s The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen, Kapka Kassabova’s Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe and A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes by Adam Rutherford.

Awards will also be given in autobiography, biography, poetry and criticism categories.