Hisham Matar, Onyi Nwabineli, Chibundu Onuzo, & More Make the Longlist for the 2025 Jhalak Prizes

The Jhalak Prizes have announced their longlist for the 2025 edition! The prose, poetry, and children’s & YA prizes have a list of twelve books each in consideration for the final award.

Among the longlisted are a number of authors in the African diaspora. American-born British-Libyan Hisham Matar, for instance, is on the Jhalak Prose Prize longlist for My Friends, which is also on the longlist for the Booker Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award. Also on the prose longlist is Nigerian-British Onyi Nwabineli’s novel Allow Me to Introduce Myself and Aniefiok Ekpoudom’s social history Where We Come From.

The poetry prize longlist includes British-Nigerian Gboyega Odubanjo’s collection ​Adam and Nigerian Chibundu Onuzo’s children’s book Mayowa and the Sea of Words is on the longlist for the children’s & YA prize.

First awarded in March 2017, the Jhalak Prize awards seek to celebrate books by writers of color in the UK and Ireland. The shortlists will be announced on April 22 and the winners of each of the three prizes will be announced on June 4.

See the full longlist for each category below!

Prose

• Allow Me to Introduce Myself, Onyi Nwabineli (Magpie)

• Determination, Tawseef Khan (Footnote)

• Dispersals, Jessica J. Lee (Hamish Hamilton)

• Everest, Ashani Lewis (Dialogue)

• Manny and the Baby, Varaidzo (Scribe)

• My Friends, Hisham Matar (Penguin Viking)

• Namesake: Reflections on a Warrior Woman, N.S. Nuseibeh (Canongate)

• The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley (Sceptre)

• The Strangers, Ekow Eshun (Hamish Hamilton)

• The Rest of You, Mame Blue(Verve)

• The Thirty Before Thirty List, Tasneem Abdur-Rashid (Zaffre)

• Where We Come From: Rap, Home & Hope in Modern Britain, Aniefiok Ekpoudom (Faber)

Poetry

• ​Adam, Gboyega Odubanjo (Faber)

• Agimat, Romalyn Ante (Chatto & Windus)

• amuk, Khairani Barokka (Nine Arches Press)

• Boiled Owls, Azad Ashim Sharma (Out-Spoken Press)

• Collected Poems, Mimi Khalvati (Carcanet)

• Emotional Support Horse, Claudine Toutoungi (Carcanet)

• Fantasia, Nisha Ramayya (Granta Poetry)

• Horse,  Rushika Wick (Broken Sleep Books)

• Self-Portrait with Family, Amaan Hyder (Nine Arches Press)

• Signs, Music, Raymond Antrobus (Picador Poetry)

• The Tattoo Collector, Tim Tim Chen (Nine Arches Press)

• Top Doll, Karen McCarthy Woolf (Dialogue Books)

Children’s & YA

• Bringing Back Kay-Kay, Dev Kothari (Walker)

• Flower Block, Lanisha Butterfield & Hoang Giang (Puffin)

• It’s Time to Hush and Say Goodnight, Chitra Soundar, ill Sandhya Prabhat (Walker)

• King of Nothing, Nathanael Lessore (Hot Key)

• Little Dinosaurs Big Feelings, Swapna Haddow & Yiting Lee (Magic Cat)

• Mayowa and the Sea of Words, Chibundu Onuzo (Bloomsbury)

• Red Sky at Night, Poet’s Delight, Alex Wharton, ill Ian Morris (Firefly Press)

• The Boy to Beat the Gods, Ashley Thorpe (Usborne)

• The Gift, Jii and Nikos Parkes Trepkas (Tate Publishing)

• The Hidden Story of Estie Noor, Nadine Aisha Jassat, ill Sandhya Prabhat (Orion)

• The Thread That Connects Us, Ayaan Mohamud (Usborne)

• These Stolen Lives, Sharada Keats (Scholastic)