KARACHI: President Ayub Khan yesterday handed over awards to the winners of the Adamjee Prize for Literature for 1959-60 at the President’s House immediately after the annual investiture ceremony. The winners are: Ghulam Abbas and Shaukat Siddiqui (Urdu); and Syed Abdul Sattar and Roshan Yazdani (Bengali). Each of the winners received Rs5,000.

Presenting the winners to the president, Qudratullah Shahab, Secretary-General of the Writers’ Guild, said: “The idea of giving away the Adamjee Prize in a ceremony linked with the investiture is rather unorthodox and may be frowned upon by the lovers of rigid protocol. We owe this honour to the president, who himself suggested this arrangement so that the value of the prize is duly recognised and the Guild is saved from extra expenditure on holding a separate function.”

He added that in monetary value this is about the highest non-official award for literature available in Asia. “The Pakistan Writers’ Guild is grateful to the House of Adamjee for being the pioneers in providing this incentive to literary activity in our country. We hope that other people of wealth will also see something good in this example to follow.”

The prize is divided equally amongst the best books in Urdu and Bengali published every year.

New road being repairedKARACHI: Re-carpeted only about a week ago, the Mohammad Ali Jinnah Road is already being repaired. The engineering staff of the Karachi Municipal Committee was last evening seen filling potholes and repairing portions of the road that have sagged or corroded.

In the opinion of KMC’s engineers, an official told Dawn, the road had sagged due to excessive braking by motorists. He explained that while the road was being re-carpeted the traffic had to be diverted into by-lanes, and motorists, when signalled by Traffic Police Constables, jammed the brake and took a sharp turn, damaging the wet surface of the road.

An engineer of the KMC, however, said that the material used in the section of the road near the Old Exhibition, which had been damaged, was being tested in the laboratory to assess its efficacy.