‘Enter Ghost’ wins Aspen Words Literary Prize

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad (Jonathan Cape) has won the 2024 Aspen Words Literary Prize.

Worth US$35,000 (A$53,540), the Aspen prize recognises ‘an influential work of fiction that illuminates a vital contemporary issue and demonstrates the transformative power of literature on thought and culture’.

Enter Ghost, which is Hammad’s second novel following her 2019 debut The Parisian, has also been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. The Aspen prize judges said Enter Ghost was ‘a poignant narrative of resilience and the quest for belonging’.

‘In elegant, nuanced prose, Isabella Hammad tells the story of Sonia Nasir, a stage actress living in London who returns to her homeland of Palestine to visit her sister, Haneen, after many years away, and finds herself roped into a production of Hamlet in the West Bank,’ said the judges. ‘Exploring themes of diaspora, displacement and the search for identity, Hammad constructs a world rich in texture and emotion.’

The award was presented in New York on 25 April.

More information about the prize and finalists is available at the prize website.

Category: International news