Join Footnotes x Counterpoints Fiction Prize shortlisted writers for an evening of readings and reflections hosted by author Colin Grant.
This event brings together shortlisted authors, ahead of the announcement of the overall prize winner in June. During the event the writers reflect on themes of displacement, belonging, courage and creativity, both in the selected works and beyond. Hosted by Colin Grant.
The £15,000 prize aims to highlight writers from refugee and migrant backgrounds whose work explores themes of displacement, courage and belonging. It champions bold new literary voices whose stories offer fresh perspectives on our world.
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.
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.
The shortlisted works
- 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.
Book your ticket
Tickets are booked via the Southbank Centre.
