Jamil Ahmad presented the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize for His Book The Wandering Falcon

Jamil Ahmad was declared the winner of the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize for his book The Wandering Falcon at the British Council in New Delhi on 21 December 2011. The Wandering Falcon, is a narrative about the lives of tribal people along the borders of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. The book contained personal sights, sounds, actual faces and conversations.

The book that has won critical acclaim worldwide was written decades ago and then went into hibernation for 40 years. He started writing the book in 1971, it was completed by 1973 and then it hibernated for 40 years.
Born in Jalandhar in 1933, Jamil Ahmad is a Pakistani national. He had not agreed to the demands of the publishers, which eventually led to the book being locked away for four decades. The book was published by Hamish Hamilton — an imprint of Penguin earlier in 2011.

Ahmad was posted in Quetta in 1959 where he first came into contact with tribals and was fascinated by their lives and their stories.

The former civil servant from Pakistan, Ahmad gave away the prize money of Rs. 1 lakh to St. Columba's School, where he was enrolled from 1941 to 1944.

The prize is set up in memory of writer and editor Shakti Bhatt. A shortlist of six books was announced ahead of the prize ceremony. The shortlist included The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed, The Truth About Me by A. Revathi, Chinaman by Shehan Karunatilaka, A Free Man by Aman Sethi and R.D. Burman: The Man, The Music by Anirudha Bhattacharjee and Balaji Vittal.

The winner was chosen by a jury comprising graphic novelist and illustrator Sarnath Bannerjee, writer and blogger Jai Arjun Singh, and novelist Palash Krishna Mehrotra.