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Isabella Hammad has won the newly boosted RSL Encore Award for her second novel Enter Ghost (Vintage), now worth £15,000.
The prize’s founder and funder Lucy Astor has increased the prize pot this year from £10,000 to £15,000 "recognising the growing need for support of writers", the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) announced at the ceremony in central London on Wednesday evening (19th June).
The four shortlisted authors – Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ for A Spell of Good Things (Canongate), A K Blakemore for The Glutton (Granta), Una Mannion for Tell Me What I Am (Faber) and Megan Nolan for Ordinary Human Failings (Penguin) – were awarded £1,000 (previously £500).
The Encore RSL award celebrates the second novel, marking the achievements of authors moving beyond their literary debuts. It was first presented in 1990 and has been administrated by the RSL since 2016.
Hammad said said: "Everyone loves a debut, but I think it may actually be in the tricky transition from the first book to the second that a writer really becomes a writer."
The London-based writer told The Bookseller how prizes are particularly important right now. "It’s difficult to make a living as a writer, especially with the rise in cost of living," she said. "The second novel is also a famously hard moment for writers who are still at the beginning of their careers, so prizes like this are incredibly valuable for both the material support they offer and the recognition."
The author called for "more government funding for the arts" given the wider landscape for funding. She told The Bookseller: "The UK should follow the example of other European countries that have a stronger governmental funding model for festivals and cultural infrastructure, instead of forcing such a heavy reliance on corporate sponsorship."
Enter Ghost follows Sonia, a British Palestinian actress who flees a failed marriage and love affair in London to stay with her sister in the West Bank.
The judges described the book "as profound as it is powerful, exploring in beautiful prose the essential, humanising importance of art in a world overthrown by conflict".
They added: "In a voice that is always original Hammad takes one of the most intractable and polarising conflicts of our time and creates a story braided through with compassion and wisdom. The political, she reminds us, is always human."
Hammad, also the author of The Parisian (Vintage), has won the Plimpton Prize for Fiction, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Palestine Book Award and a Betty Trask Award. She has received various fellowships and was named a Granta Best Young British Novelist last year.