From correspondents in New York, United States, 12:00 AM IST

Indian writer Vikram Chandra's novel 'Sacred Games' was short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) award for fiction in the US, but failed to win the prestigious honour.

The annual award went to Dominican-American writer Junot Diaz's first novel 'The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao', as announced at an event in Manhattan Thursday.

Along with Pulitzers and the National Book Awards, NBCC awards the top three literary honours in the US.

Chandra's 'Sacred Games' is a big, gritty novel about Mumbai that has received critical acclaim. It won the Hutch Crossword Award for English Fiction for 2006 and Salon Book Award, 2007.

HarperCollins published it in the US last year after its Indian publication in 2006 by Penguin.

Chandra's collection of short stories, 'Love and Longing in Bombay' (1997) won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Eurasia region).

'Red Earth and Pouring Rain', his 1995 debut novel, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and the David Higham Prize for Fiction.

Chandra co-wrote 'Mission Kashmir' (2000), a film starring Hrithik Roshan and Preity Zinta, which was made by his brother-in-law Vidhu Vinod Chopra.

Born in Delhi in 1961, Chandra currently divides his time between Mumbai and Berkeley, California, where he teaches creative writing at the University of California.

His wife Melanie Abrams is also a novelist.

(Staff Writer, © IANS)