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The shortlists for the Jhalak Prize and the Jhalak Children’s & Young Adult Prize 2024 have been unveiled, with prize director Sunny Singh calling the chosen books “necessary, urgent and timeless”.
The Jhalak Prize is an annual literary award for British or British-resident writers of colour, established in 2016. A sister award for children’s and YA books was announced and launched in 2021.
Six books are selected for each prize, with this year’s Jhalak Prize shortlist spanning fiction, non-fiction about landscape and the natural world, a true crime tale and an award-winning poet and the Children’s and Young Adult Prize shortlist featuring young fiction, illustrated picture books, a YA thriller and a debut for middle-grade readers.
Up for the Jhalak Prize are Noreen Masud for A Flat Place (Penguin), Yepoka Yeebo for Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Swindled the World (Bloomsbury) and Ami Rao for Boundary Road (Everything with Words).
Also in contention are Jaqueline Crooks for Fire Rush (Vintage), Jason Allen-Paisant for Self-Portrait as Othello (Carcanet) and Elizabeth-Jane Burnett for Twelve Words for Moss (Penguin).
Up for the Children’s & Young Adult Prize are: Nadia Shireen for Geoffrey Gets the Jitters, (Puffin); How to Die Famous by Benjamin Dean (Simon & Schuster); Safiyyah’s War by Hiba Noor Khan (Andersen Press); Steady for This by Nathanael Lessore (Hot Key Books); To The Other Side by Erika Meza (Hodder Children’s Books) and Wild Song by Candy Gourlay (David Fickling Books).
The Judges for the 2024 Jhalak Prize are authors Anni Domingo, Stella Oni and Denise Saul. Judging the Children’s & Young Adult Prize are authors JP Rose, Rashmi Sirdeshpande and Danielle Jawando, winner of the 2023 Children’s & Young Adult Prize for When Our Worlds Collided (Simon & Schuster).
Prize director Sunny Singh said of the shortlists: “Every year, the Jhalak Prize shortlists exemplify literary excellence in contemporary Britain and mark them as future classics. I am in awe of the courage required to tackle difficult themes and ideas coupled with the command of the chosen genre and form demonstrated by our shortlistees. These are books about belonging and its price, about confronting injustice with hope, and about the audacity of trying even in the face of impossible odds. Most of all, these are books about moral courage, which makes the books on our 2024 shortlists necessary, urgent and timeless.”
The two winners will be announced at the British Library on Thursday 30th May 2024. Each winner will be awarded £1,000 and a specially created work of art as part of the ongoing Jhalak Art Residency. This year’s artists are Samer Abdelnour for the Jhalak Book of the Year and Yousef Saif for the Jhalak Children’s and YA Prize.