Jhalak Children’s and YA Prize 2023 – Winner Announced!

5 June, 2023

Cover shot of When Our Worlds Collided.

Danielle Jawando has been named the winner of the Jhalak Children’s and Young Adult (YA) Prize 2023 for her “powerful and devastating” YA novel When Our Worlds Collided (Simon & Schuster Children’s).

When Our Worlds Collided is Jawando’s second YA novel. Her debut  And the Stars Were Burning Brightly was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, the YA Book Prize, the Jhalak Children’s & YA Prize and the the Branford Boase Award.

Jawando is the third recipient of the Jhalak Children’s and YA Prize, which was set up in 2020 to celebrate books for children, teens and young adults written by British or British-resident BAME authors. It is a sister award to the Jhalak Prize, which was first awarded in 2017. This year’s Jhalak Prize winner was Travis Alabanza for None of the Above (Canongate).

 A coming-of-age story about chance encounters, injustice and how the choices that we make can change our futures, When Our Worlds Collided was chosen from a shortlist of six titles by a panel of judges that included Maisie Chan, author of Dannie Chung Does Not Do Maths and last year’s winner.

Commenting on this year’s award winners, prize director Sunny Singh said: “None of the Above by Travis Alabanza is a thoughtful, stunningly crafted meditation on identity, survival, resilience and defiance that inhabits the personal, but also transcends it to speak to universal ethical, moral and human concerns. Danielle Jawando’s When Our Worlds Collided is a compelling young adult novel that is urgent, necessary and intensely compassionate. These are books to be read, read again and cherished. These are also books that demand to be pushed into every readers’ hands.”

See the full shortlist for this year’s Jhalak Children’s and YA Award here.

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