Kavya Prize 2024– Prizegiving Ceremony

Join us on the 10th October at the Mitchell Library as we celebrate some of Scotland's best writers and poets of colour and announce the winner of the Kavya Prize 2024.

The Kavya Prize for Scottish Writers of Colour was founded by Scottish Indian author Leela Soma in collaboration with Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. Now in it's third year, the Kavya Prize 2024 shortlist features: Tim Tim Cheng, Andrés N. Ordorica, Arun Sood, Amanda Thomson and Lorraine Wilson.

This special prizegiving ceremony hosted by Kavya Prize 2024 judge Amina Shah, National Librarian and Chief Executive of the National Library of Scotland, will include some words as well as readings from Amina and fellow judges academic Sourit Bhattacharya and author Iphgenia Baal. There will also be the opportunity to borrow the shortlisted titles from Glasgow Libraries:

• TIM TIM CHENG – TAPPING ON GLASS

• ANDRÉS N. ORDORICA - AT LEAST THIS I KNOW

• ARUN SOOD - NEW SKIN FOR THE OLD CEREMONY

• AMANDA THOMSON - BELONGING

• LORRAINE WILSON – THE LAST TO DROWN

• TIM TIM CHENG – TAPPING ON GLASS

Tim Tim Cheng is a poet and teacher from Hong Kong, currently based between Edinburgh and London. Her poems are published or anthologised in POETRY, The Rialto, Ambit, Cicada, Our Time is a Garden, and elsewhere. She has spoken in transnational literary panels across Asia-Pacific regions, the States, and the UK. Her latest appearances include the Hidden Door festival, and Loop, BBC Scotland.

Tapping At Glass charts girlhood, multilingualism, and psychogeography from Hong Kong to Scotland. Myths, meditations on the arts and mass media, and migration stories entwine. Through protest-stricken urban spaces, love hotels, farming as activism, frog watching, alternative therapies, and seascapes where racial and social memories flow in all directions, the working class subjects in Cheng’s poems reflect on what it means to exist in one locale and dream of elsewhere, where the past and future, interconnectedness and othering, are in perpetual negotiation. Tapping into various moods, Cheng’s poems question the making of a self and a city, and the languages one uses to translate microhistories.

• ANDRÉS N. ORDORICA - AT LEAST THIS I KNOW

Andrés N. Ordorica is a queer Latinx poet and writer based in Edinburgh, whocreates worlds filled with characters who are from neither here nor there (ni de aquí, ni de allá). His novel in progress The Places We Will Go was shortlisted for the 2021 Mo Siewcharran Prize.

The powerful debut collection exploring ancestry, racism, nationhood, activism and queerness in a journey through childhood to adulthood.

These poems are a means of working through the belonging in both the physical

sense and emotional, be it the belonging of immigrant bodies in new countries, or

the belonging of the queer self within found families and safe spaces.

Ordorica’s thoughtful debut confronts trauma and pain, while making space for joy

and humour, ultimately coming to redemption as readers follow the poet navigating

his own beginnings, growth, loss, love, and journey.

• ARUN SOOD - NEW SKIN FOR THE OLD CEREMONY

Arun Sood is a Scottish-Indian writer, musician and academic working across multiple forms. He was born in Aberdeen to a West-Highland Mother and Punjabi father. Arun’s critical and creative practice ranges from academic publications, editorials and poetry to ambient musical tapestries. hIS outputs engage with diasporic identities, mixed-race heritage, ancestry, language and memory.

Four estranged friends reunite for a motorcycle trip up the Isle of Skye, in the hope of coming to terms with how their lives have splintered since a transformative ride in Northern India fourteen years earlier.

In their fumbling attempts to spiritually reconnect, expectant father Raj, recently widowed Vidhushei, always youthful Liam and perpetually fragile Bobby test the limits of their friendship around campfires, on twisty roads, in unexpected Ayahuasca ceremonies, and against discussions of belonging, race, and identity.

A novel about youth, the spectres of friendship, and colonial legacies in a small but fiercely proud nation, New Skin for the Old Ceremony spans India and Skye, seeing past ghosts exorcised in order to face the present.

• AMANDA THOMSON - BELONGING

Amanda Thomson is a Scottish writer and visual artist, and a lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art. Her first book, A Scots Dictionary of Nature, was published in 2018. She has spoken at many book festivals and had her work published in Antlers of Water, Willowherb Review, The Wild Isles, Gifts of Gravity and Light and the Guardian. She lives and works in Strathspey in the Scottish Highlands and Glasgow.

Reflecting on family, identity and nature, Belonging is a personal memoir about what it is to have and make a home. It is a love letter to nature, especially the northern landscapes of Scotland and the Scots pinewoods of Abernethy – home to standing dead trees known as snags, which support the overall health of the forest.

Belonging is a book about how we are held in thrall to elements of our past. It speaks to the importance of attention and reflection, and will encourage us all to look and observe and ask questions of ourselves.

Beautifully written and featuring Amanda Thomson's artwork and photography throughout, it explores how place, language and family shape us and make us who we are.

• LORRAINE WILSON – THE LAST TO DROWN

Lorraine Wilson is a third culture Scot, conservation scientist and award-winning author of speculative fiction influenced by folklore and the wilderness. She has been stalked by wolves and befriended pythons, runs the Rewriting The Margins mentorship scheme for marginalised writers. She has published two novels with Luna Press - the dystopian thriller This Is Our Undoing, and the dark folkloric mystery, The Way The Light Bends. Her latest book, Mother Sea, is an exploration of motherhood, climate change and belonging.

Kavya Prize nominated novella The Last To Drown, was published by Luna Press in February 2024. The Last To Drown started out as a short story that didn’t fit its own skin. It was trying to say too much, and it was only by venturing into novellas for the first time that I could give it space to speak. It’s a story about cool Icelandic ghosts because I’ve always loved Icelandic folklore, but only discovered Icelandic lullabies since a fake one roved the internet and real ones turned out to be just as haunting! So the fabulously creepy line from one such - ‘Outside waits a face at the window’ - was a thread through the story from the beginning. I think lullabies are fascinating, they’re often pretty dark (think about the ending to Rock-a-bye-baby), and they carry associations of parenthood, protection, and comfort in the night which can all easily become eerie if you give them a twist.

But beneath the spooky, this book is about grief and PTSD and broken families; about how whole lives can be thrown off course by private cataclysms. It is also a deeply personal exploration of chronic pain. This is something I live with, and The Last To Drown is my first time writing from that part of myself. Chronic pain isn’t fun, so I’ve never particularly wanted to write it before, but the character of Tinna came to me this way and I am honestly really glad I’ve written her. It matters so much to me to have stories in the world that portray disability without dressing it up in villain or miracle cure tropes. That show the connections between pain and medicalisation and mental health. Tinna considers herself broken, but that’s as much about her mind and her heart as it is her flesh and bones. And that’s where her healing lies too - in reclaiming her self, rather than in the physical; because it’s the loss of your old self that is, in my experience, a far harder grief to carry

Host or Publisher Glasgow Libraries