Sun 31 May 2026, 7.45pm
Meet the finalists for this £15,000 fiction prize for writers from refugee and migrant backgrounds who shine a light on today’s most pertinent topics.
Tickets from £5 + £4 booking feeView more time and price information
Run time 1 hour and 15 minutes (approx)
This event brings together some of the shortlisted authors of the prize, ahead of the announcement of the overall prize winner in June. During the event, chaired by author Colin Grant, the writers reflect on themes of displacement, belonging, courage and creativity, both in the selected works and beyond.
The winner is selected by a judging panel composed of acclaimed writer Dina Nayeri; Waterstones’ Head of Books, Bea Carvalho; Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize-shortlisted and Observer Best New Novelist, Gurnaik Johal; Footnote Press Commissioning Editor, Serena Arthur; and director and co-founder of Counterpoints Arts, Almir Koldzic.
The shortlisted works include:
Eleanor Chan’s When I Bleed It Is Like a Squashed Raspberry, a meditation on amnesia, re-remembering and the healing power of storytelling.
Jose Hall’s What The Trees Remember, which follows a neurodivergent woman of Jamaican and Cornish heritage uncovering fractured histories of migration, otherness and silence.
Erica Li’s A Thousand Rivers of Time, a family saga chronicling the lives of three generations of women from a Hakka-Chinese family from 1945 to the present.
Joel Mordi’s Backward Into the Future: ‘Her Past Was His Future’ an Afro-folkloric novel in which a trans griot who guards ancestral memory and a gay Nigerian asylum seeker become bound across time.
Ahmed Najar’s The Weight of Staying which follows a Palestinian-British narrator reckoning with exile, where surviving the loss of place draws him into ghosthood.
Maryam Namazie’s Bird of Dawn which charts an encounter between a pregnant Iranian refugee cast into the Aegean Sea and an ancient folkloric witness.
Presented in association with Counterpoints Arts and Footnote.
Colin Grant is an author whose books include Bageye at the Wheel, shortlisted for the Pen Ackerley Prize; Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation; I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be; and his forthcoming book What We Leave We Carry.
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