The Jhalak Prize
We're thrilled to partner with the Jhalak Prize – which celebrates books by writers of colour – to help them increase awareness of the prize titles amongst booksellers, who have always been the best champions of books in their local communities.
Other ways we support reading
The Jhalak Prize 2025
The Jhalak Prize announced its 2025 shortlists on 22nd April 2025. For the last nine years, the Prize has celebrated the very best books from writers of colour whose work has been published in the United Kingdom and Ireland. This year, the Prize has expanded its list with a dedicated poetry award.
The 18 shortlisted titles, selected for the ways in which the authors meet the moment with exceptional storytelling, emotional impact and literary innovation, reflect the extraordinary quality of work being produced by writers of colour in the UK and Ireland.
The three shortlists offer narratives that cover a breadth of subjects but are universally resonant, taking the reader across regions of Britain to 90s Ghana and Imperial Japan and beyond as they examine exile, music, addiction, friendships and love.
Discover these brilliant books below, which you'll find on the shelves in your local bookshop. Plus, enter our competition to win a shortlist of your choice!
The winners will be announced on 4th June in a special ceremony at the London Library.
This year's judging panel includes the two winners of the 2024 Jhalak Prizes, Yepoka Yeebo and Hiba Noor Khan, alongside Jason Allen-Paisant, Malika Booker, Will Harris, Sareeta Domingo, Taran N. Khan, Yassmin Abdel-Magied and Alom Shaha.
2025 also sees the ongoing expansion of the annual Jhalak Art Residency. An artist of colour is commissioned to create a unique work of art that serves as the trophy for the winner of the Jhalak Prize, the Jhalak Poetry Prize and the Jhalak Children's & YA Prize.
The artists in residence for 2025 are:
Khaver Idrees - Jhalak Poetry Prize
Ketna Patel - Jhalak Prose Prize
Lucy Farfort - Jhalak Children's & YA Prize
Visit jhalakprize.com for more about the prize, the Art Residency, and this year's judges.
Want to hear more? Don't forget to follow #JhalakPrize25 and @jhalakprize on social media for updates.
Read more
The Jhalak Prose Prize shortlist 2025
Everest
by Ashani Lewis (Dialogue)
Manny and the Baby
by Varaidzo (Scribe)
My Friends
by Hisham Matar (Penguin Viking)
Namesake: Reflections on a Warrior Woman
by N.S. Nuseibeh (Canongate)
The Rest of You
by Maame Blue (Verve)
Where We Come From: Rap, Home and Hope in Modern Britain
by Aniefiok Ekpoudom (Faber)
Jhalak Children's & YA Prize shortlist 2024
Bringing Back Kay-Kay
by Dev Kothari (Walker)
Flower Block
by Lanisha Butterfield, illustrated by Hoang Giang (Puffin)
King of Nothing
by Nathanael Lessore (Hot Key)
Mayowa and the Sea of Words
by Chibundu Onuzo (Bloomsbury)
The Boy to Beat the Gods
by Ashley Thorpe (Usborne)
The Thread That Connects Us
by Ayaan Mohamud (Usborne)
The Jhalak Poetry Prize shortlist 2025
Adam
by Gboyega Odubanjo (Faber)
Boiled Owls
by Azad Ashim Sharma (Out-Spoken Press)
Collected Poems
by Mimi Khalvati (Carcanet)
Horse
by Rushika Wick (Broken Sleep Books)
Self-Portrait with Family
by Amaan Hyder (Nine Arches Press)
Top Doll
by Karen McCarthy Woolf (Dialogue)
"The authors on our 2025 shortlists do not flinch from harsh realities of our histories, times and lives. Yet each of these books is an exquisitely crafted, stunning work of literature that is full of love, hope and joy."
Sunny Singh, Prize Director
The Jhalak Prize longlist 2025
Allow Me to Introduce Myself
by Onyi Nwabineli (Magpie)
Determination
by Tawseef Khan (Footnote)
Dispersals
by Jessica J. Lee (Hamish Hamilton)
Everest
by Ashani Lewis (Dialogue)
Manny and the Baby
by Varaidzo (Scribe)
My Friends
by Hisham Matar (Penguin Viking)
Namesake: Reflections on a Warrior Woman
by N.S. Nuseibeh (Canongate)
The Ministry of Time
by Kaliane Bradley (Sceptre)
The Rest of You
by Maame Blue (Verve)
The Strangers
by Ekow Eshun (Hamish Hamilton)
The Thirty Before Thirty List
by Tasneem Abdur-Rashid (Zaffre)
Where We Come From: Rap, Home and Hope in Modern Britain
by Aniefiok Ekpoudom (Faber)
Jhalak Children's & YA Prize longlist 2025
Bringing Back Kay-Kay
by Dev Kothari (Walker)
Flower Block
by Lanisha Butterfield, illustrated by Hoang Giang (Puffin)
It's Time to Hush and Say Goodnight
by Chitra Soundar, illustrated by Sandhya Prabhat (Walker)
King of Nothing
by Nathanael Lessore (Hot Key)
Little Dinosaurs, Big Feelings
by Swapna Haddow, illustrated by Yiting Lee (Magic Cat)
Mayowa and the Sea of Words
by Chibundu Onuzo (Bloomsbury)
Red Sky at Night, Poet's Delight
by Alex Wharton, illustrated by Ian Morris (Firefly Press)
The Boy to Beat the Gods
by Ashley Thorpe (Usborne)
The Gift
by Jii & Nikos Parkes Trepkas (Tate Publishing)
The Hidden Story of Estie Noor
by Nadine Aisha Jassat, illustrated by Sandhya Prabhat (Orion)
The Thread That Connects Us
by Ayaan Mohamud (Usborne)
These Stolen Lives
by Sharada Keats (Scholastic)
Jhalak Poetry Prize longlist 2025
Adam
by Gboyega Odubanjo (Faber)
Agimat
by Romalyn Ante (Chatto & Windus)
amuk
by Khairani Barokka (Nine Arches Press)
Boiled Owls
by Azad Ashim Sharma (Out-Spoken Press)
Collected Poems
by Mimi Khalvati (Carcanet)
Emotional Support Horse
by Claudine Toutoungi (Carcanet)
Fantasia
by Nisha Ramayya (Granta Poetry)
Horse
by Rushika Wick (Broken Sleep Books)
Self-Portrait with Family
by Amaan Hyder (Nine Arches Press)
Signs, Music
by Raymond Antrobus (Picador Poetry)
The Tattoo Collector
by Tim Tim Chen (Nine Arches Press)
Top Doll
by Karen McCarthy Woolf (Dialogue)
The Jhalak Prize celebrates books by writers of colour and annually awards £1,000 to three winners. The Jhalak Art Residency sees an artist of colour commissioned to create a unique work of art that serves as the trophy for each of the winners of the 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
Find out more about the Jhalak Art Residency.
In Spring 2024, The Jhalak Foundation and the Royal Literary Fund’s WritersMosaic launched The Review, an editorially independent, 16-page biannual insert in The Bookseller magazine.
At National Book Tokens, we're thrilled to be partnering with the Jhalak Prize for the fifth year to help them increase awareness of the prize titles amongst booksellers, who have always been the best champions of books in their local communities. By distributing point-of-sale kits and social assets to bookshops, and by amplifying their activities through tailored PR support, we help them to create instore displays and shout about the longlists, shortlists and winners from their online channels and in local press.
"Championing the Jhalak Prize has always been so important for us. It has been an honour to have sponsored two winners, one being a Newham author. Such an important prize."
- Vivian Archer, Newham Bookshop
Previous winners of the Jhalak Prize are Yepoka Yeebo for Anansi's Gold: the Man Who Swindled the World (2024), Travis Alabanza for None of the Above (2023), Sabba Khan for The Roles We Play (2022), Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi for The First Woman (Oneworld) in 2021, Johny Pitts for Afropean: Notes from Black Europe (Penguin) in 2020, Guy Gunaratne for In Our Mad and Furious City (Tinder Press) in 2019, Reni Eddo-Lodge for Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race (Bloomsbury Circus) in 2018 and Jacob Ross for The Bone Readers (Little, Brown) in 2017. Previous winners of the Jhalak Children's & Young Adult Prize are Hiba Noor Khan for Safiyyah's War (2024), Daniella Jawando for When Our Worlds Collided (2023), Maisie Chan Danny Chung Does Not Do Maths (2022) and Patrice Lawrence for Eight Pieces of Silva (2021).
Visit www.jhalakprize.com to learn more.
Supporting reading for everyone
We've been proud sponsors of World Book Day for 28 years. We also support other literary charities and prizes, work with schools to promote reading for pleasure, and invest in high street bookshops.
Who we work with
