Jhalak prizes 2024 winners announced

In the UK, Yepoka Yeebo has won the 2024 Jhalak Prize for Anansi’s Gold: The man who swindled the world (Bloomsbury), and Hiba Noor Khan has won the Jhalak Children’s & Young Adult Prize for Safiyyah’s War (Andersen Press), reports the Bookseller.

Anansi’s Gold was praised by the judges as a story that ‘vividly illuminates Ghana’s complex history’, while Safiyyah’s War is set in Paris during the Second World War, and was described as ‘an exquisitely written, hopeful, and necessary book for these impossibly difficult times’.

Prize director Sunny Singh said: ‘While this year’s winners are very different in form, style, theme and content, they speak urgently and yet timelessly to a world in turmoil. Yepoka Yeebo’s Anansi’s Gold is an exhilarating journey through the life—and almost unbelievable adventures—of one of the world’s greatest conmen.’ Singh continued: ‘Hiba Noor Khan’s Safiyyah’s War is an extraordinary story of courage, hope and humanity in the face of unspeakable horrors. These are books for the world we live in, and the one we must imagine, and build for the future—books to read now, pass on to the future, and treasure forever.’

The winners were chosen from shortlists announced in April.

The Jhalak Prize (first awarded in 2017) and the Jhalak Children’s & Young Adult Prize (founded in 2020) seek to ‘celebrate books by writers of colour in Britain and Ireland’.

Last year’s winners were Travis Alabanza, who won the Jhalak Prize for None of the Above (Canongate), and Danielle Jawando, who won the Jhalak Children’s and Young Adult Prize for When Our Worlds Collided (S&S Children’s).

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