You are viewing your 1 free article this month.
Sign in to make the most of your access to expert book trade coverage.
Mimi Khalvati, NS Nuseibeh and Nathanael Lessore win the 2025 Jhalak Prizes
Authors Mimi Khalvati, NS Nuseibeh and Nathanael Lessore have won this year’s ninth Jhalak Prizes.
Khalvati, winner of the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry and founder of The Poetry School, won the inaugural Jhalak Poetry Prize for what judges called her “luminous testament to a lifetime of lyrical precision”, Collected Poems (Carcanet).
Lessore, winner of the Branford Boase Award and shortlisted for the Jhalak Children’s & Young Adult Prize in 2024, won the 2025 Jhalak Children’s & Young Adult Prize for his “hilarious yet urgent” novel, King of Nothing (Hot Key).
Finally Nuseibeh, a British-Palestinian writer and researcher, won the 2025 Jhalak Prose Prize for her “deft and immersive collection of essays”, Namesake: Reflections on a Warrior Woman (Canongate).
The ceremony took place on Wednesday evening (4th June) at a reception at the British Library. The awards were also live-streamed globally. Each writer was awarded £1,000 and a specially commissioned, unique trophy created by artists Khaver Idrees (for the Jhalak Poetry Prize), Lucy Farfort (for the Jhalak Children’s & Young Adult Prize) and Ketna Patel (for the Jhalak Prose Prize).
Prize director Sunny Singh said: “The 2025 Jhalak judges have picked three very different books that are each towering literary achievements in their unique ways. These are books full of courage, insight and panache. Mimi Khalvati’s Collected Poems, NS Nuseibeh’s Namesake: Reflections on a Warrior Woman and Nathanael Lessore’s King of Nothing are very different books in terms of genre, style and the readers they address.
“Yet they compassionately and with utmost honesty confront terrible realities and explore painful and complex histories and lives even as they exemplify playful stylistic experimentation and mastery of form and language. Most of all, they find courage, empathy and delight in places and moments where these seem entirely impossible. In their nuanced explorations of the human experience, Khalvati, Lessore and Nuseibeh offer hope, beauty and joy.”
Continues...
Read More
The judges for the inaugural Jhalak Poetry Prize were Jason Allen-Paisant, Malika Booker and Will Harris, while the panel for Children’s & Young Adult Prize was Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Hiba Noor Khan and Alom Shaha. The Prose Prize panel was made up of Sareeta Domingo, Taran N Khan and Yepoka Yeebo.
Established in 2016, the Jhalak Prize is unique in its celebration of exceptional work across genre and format, with fiction, non-fiction, short stories, graphic novels, poetry and self-published writers, eligible. The Jhalak Prize awards celebrate the creativity, imagination and literary excellence that people of colour bring to the UK publishing landscape. In 2024, the Jhalak Prize expanded its portfolio 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.
The Jhalak Prize’s ongoing partnership with National Book Tokens sees bookshops up and down the country championing the prize, each year reaching new reading communities.
Every year, artists of colour are commissioned to create unique works of art that serve as trophies for the winners of the Jhalak Prize awards.
The artists in residence for this year are Khaver Idrees for the Poetry Prize, Ketna Patel for the Prose Prize and Lucy Farfort for the Children’s & YA Prize. The newly founded Jhalak Poetry Prize is supported by the independent poetry publisher Ink Sweat & Tears. The annual Jhalak Art Residency has also expanded this year.
