N.S. Nuseibeh, Mimi Khalvati and Nathanael Lessore win the 2025 Jhalak Prizes
The 2025 Jhalak Prizes went to N.S. Nuseibeh for prose, Mimi Khalvati for poetry and Nathanael Lessore for children's and young adult writing.
The winners of the 2025 Jhalak Prizes were announced on 4 June 2025. N.S. Nuseibeh won the Prose Prize for Namesake: Reflections on a Warrior Woman (Canongate); Mimi Khalvati won the Poetry Prize for her Collected Poems; and Nathanael Lessore won the Children's and Young Adult Prize for King of Nothing.
This was the first year in which the main award was divided into separate prizes for prose and poetry, alongside the children's and young adult prize that has run since 2020. The Jhalak Prize was founded in 2016 by the writers Sunny Singh and Nikesh Shukla with Media Diversified, and recognises books by writers of colour in Britain. Each winner receives £1,000.
Nuseibeh is a British-Palestinian writer and researcher born and raised in East Jerusalem. Lessore's King of Nothing went on to win the Shadowers' Choice Medal for Writing at the Carnegie Medals a fortnight later.
Why it matters: giving poetry its own prize removes the awkward comparison between a collected poems and a work of non-fiction, and gives each form a clearer platform. For writers of colour in Britain, the Jhalak shortlists have become a reliable route to readers and booksellers who might otherwise overlook them.
Sources: Jhalak Prize: 2025 Prose Prize winner; The Bookseller: Khalvati, Nuseibeh and Lessore win the 2025 Jhalak Prizes.