Jhalak Prize announces 2025 longlist with new award for poetry

The 2025 Jhalak Prize longlist has been announced, and this year the list includes a new award for poetry. Now in its ninth year, the prize celebrates books from writers of colour whose work has been published in the UK and Ireland.

This year, the Jhalak Prizes has expanded its lists to honour poetry with a dedicated award, with the three prizes now named the Jhalak Prose Prize, the Jhalak Poetry Prize and the Jhalak Children’s & YA Prize.

Prize founder, Sunny Singh, said: "It is clear in the ninth year of the Jhalak Prize awards that the quality of work being produced by writers of colour in Britain and Ireland is extraordinary.

The judges for all three awards, including our inaugural Jhalak Poetry Prize, have struggled to select only 12 books for each longlist and have chosen them with immense care, difficulty and heartbreak for all the books that they could not include. These books do not flinch from the harsh realities of our histories, times and lives. Yet they are also books full of love, hope and joy."

The Jhalak Prize also has an ongoing partnership with National Book Tokens and bookshops up and down the country champion the prize, each year reaching new reading communities. The newly founded Jhalak Poetry Prize is supported by the independent poetry publisher Ink Sweat & Tears.

The judges for the Jhalak Poetry Prize are poets Jason Allen-Paisant, Malika Booker and Will Harris.

Harris said: "This longlist demands to be looked at. These are 12 poetry books by writers of colour published at a time when fewer than 1% of students at GCSE level study a book by a writer of colour. These are books saying valuable things in unusual forms. Like all good poetry, each book is uniquely receptive to the speech of our time, finding out the spaces in language where ideology inserts itself and picking it apart."

The judges for the Jhalak Prose Prize are authors Sareeta Domingo, Taran N Khan and Yepoka Yeebo.

Judge and 2024 winner Yeebo added: "This year’s books were so brilliant that deciding on a longlist was genuinely agonising. British writers and poets are doing mesmerisingly good work. The stories, the ideas, the feelings, the turns of phrase in this year’s longlist have changed the way I see British literature."

The judges for the Jhalak Children’s & YA Prize are authors Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Hiba Noor Khan and Alom Shaha.

Abdel-Magied said: "Being a judge for any literary competition is a huge privilege and humbling responsibility. To be a judge for the Jhalak Prize is even more so: interrogating the work of peers, of writers and illustrators sharing their craft not only to tell powerful, moving, profound stories but also ensuring characters from the Global Majority are in our canon, on our bookshelves. But the real surprise was how fun the process was. To spend time with such a range of delightful, moving and finely drawn creations has been a true highlight, and an inspiration."

As part of the prize an artist of colour on the Jhalak Art Residency is commissioned to create a unique work of art that serves as the trophy for the winner of each of the three prizes.

The artists in residence for 2025 are: Khaver Idrees (Jhalak Poetry Prize), Ketna Patel (Jhalak Prose Prize), Lucy Farfort (Jhalak Children’s & YA Prize).

Continues…