Danielle Jawando wins the Jhalak Children’s & Young Adult Prize

Danielle Jawando has won the Jhalak Children’s & Young Adult Prize for her powerful coming of age story When Our Worlds Collided. First awarded in March 2017, the Jhalak Prize and its new sister award Jhalak Children’s & YA Prize founded in 2020, seek to celebrate books by British/British resident BAME writers.

Praised as a ‘powerful and devastating story’, Jawando’s novel is about chance encounters, injustice and how the choices that we make can completely change our future.

The judges for the Jhalak Children’s and Young Adult Prize 2023 were author and film maker Yaba Badoe, children’s author Maisie Chan and writer Irfan Master. Master said of the winning book, ‘When Our Worlds Collided stands out for its craft, courage and connection. This is a book with a devastating impact and one that brings to light a part of Britain rarely seen in literature.’

Danielle Jawando is an author, screenwriter and Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her debut YA novel, 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, the Branford Boase Award and was longlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal, the UKLA Book Awards and the Amazing Book Awards.

She wins £1,000 and a specially created work of art as well as a complimentary two-year membership of the London Library, partner to the Jhalak Prize.

The Jhalak Prize was awarded to Travis Alabanza for None of the Above.