Zerán and Lowe win Eccles Centre and Hay Festival Writer’s Award

Authors Hannah Lowe and Alia Trabucco Zerán were announced as the 2024 winners of the Eccles Centre and Hay Festival Writer’s Award, in a reception at the British Library on 29th November.

They have each been awarded £20,000 and up to a year’s writing residency at the British Library, to develop their forthcoming books using the Library’s Americas collections. They will be given the opportunity to showcase their finished work at Hay Festival events in the UK and Latin America, and the chance to work with the Eccles Centre to facilitate events related to their research at the British Library.

Zerán and Lowe were selected from a six-strong shortlist of writers hailing from Europe, North and South America. Including both fiction and non-fiction, the 2024 shortlist covered an array of subjects relating to the Americas, including migration, gendered labour and revolution.

Head of the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library Polly Russell, who was a judge this year, said: “We could not be more excited to support Hannah Lowe and Alia Trabucco as the 2024 Eccles-Hay Writer’s Award winners. Both their projects – one focused on the Chinese population of the Caribbean and the other on Latin American identity – promise to explore untapped British Library Americas collections and to uncover aspects of Latin American and Caribbean culture and history that have been much overlooked."

Also on the judging panel this year was Hay Festival international director Cristina Fuentes La Roche. She added: “We are delighted to award the grants to two writers that explore shifting identities, belonging and its meanings on today’s world, and that would link up their literary project with the work of amazing writers and researchers from the British Library archives.

"Alia Trabucco’s project, about identity, specifically that of women, will connect the literary work of a writer who is already one of Latin America more exciting voices with the quest to explore identities by writers and artists such as Frida Kahlo.

"Hannah Lowe´s looks into the past, more specifically her own family, exploring race, colonial complexities and the legacy of the British Empire. We can’t wait to learn about their explorations and findings at the archives.”