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Alabanza and Jawando win Jhalak prizes
Travis Alabanza and Danielle Jawando have won this year’s Jhalak Prizes in a ceremony at the British Library in London.
Each winner was awarded £1,000 and received a specially created work of art as part of the ongoing Jhalak Art Residency.
Travis Alabanza won the Jhalak Prize for None of the Above (Canongate), a "beautiful book of intense vulnerability, generosity and humour” which examines seven phrases people have directed at them about their gender identity. Through these seven phrases, which include some of their most transformative experiences as a Black, mixed-race, non-binary person, Alabanza turns a mirror back on society, giving us reason to question the very framework in which we live and the ways we treat each other. None of the Above was praised by the judges for “presenting us with a voice that’s rarely heard, often stifled and desperately important".
Jawando scooped the Jhalak Children’s and Young Adult Prize for her coming of age story When Our Worlds Collided (Simon & Schuster Children’s). Praised as a “powerful and devastating story”, Jawando’s novel is about chance encounters, injustice and how the choices that we make can completely change our future. When Our Worlds Collided was commended by the judges for being a book “that speaks to many young people today that have been vilified or who go unheard”.
Sunny Singh, prize director, said: "I am grateful to the Jhalak Prize judges who brought passion, rigour and expertise to this year’s judging and sifted through submissions of the highest quality. After much deliberation and heartache, they have enthusiastically and unanimously picked two books that are timely and timeless, courageous as well as meticulously crafted.
“None of the Above by Travis Alabanza is a thoughtful, stunningly crafted meditation on identity, survival, resilience and defiance that inhabits the persona,l but also transcends it to speak to universal ethical, moral and human concerns. Danielle Jawando’s When Our Worlds Collided is compelling young adult novel that is urgent, necessary and intensely compassionate. These are books to be read, read again and cherished. These are also books that demand to be pushed into every readers’ hands.”
Judges for this year’s prize were novelist Haleh Agar, poet and non-fiction writer Anthony Vahni Capildeo and author and journalist Monica Rajesh. The judges for the Jhalak Children’s and Young Adult Prize were author and film-maker Yaba Badoe, children’s author Maisie Chan and writer Irfan Master.
