Shahnaz Habib Wins 7th Annual New American Voices Award
Fairfax, VA, October 17, 2024 – On Thursday, October 17, three finalists, three judges, and a group of readers gathered at George Mason’s Center for the Arts to celebrate the 7th Annual Institute for Immigration Research New American Voices Award and to celebrate Shahnaz Habib, author of Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel, who was awarded this year’s top prize of $5,000. The post-publication book prize recognizes recently published works that illuminate the complexity of the human experience as told by immigrants, whose work is historically underrepresented in writing and publishing. Finalists Carrie Sun, author of Private Equity: A Memoir, and Alex Espinoza, author of The Sons of El Rey were each awarded $1,000 and were joined by judges Myriam J. A. Chancy, V. V. Ganeshananthan, and Karin Tanabe to talk about the power and diversity of these stories.
In their opening conversation about the selection process, the judges praised the strengths they saw in the 70+ submissions to this year’s award. The books that most stood out “were all taking great risks, they were all very bold, and in ways that I hadn’t always realized you could be,” said Ganeshananthan. Tanabe mentioned the stereotype of the “good immigrant” and how all of the longlist and shortlist books challenged this narrative.
“You have broken molds, and that’s why we’re celebrating you tonight. We really want to congratulate you, because what you’ve done is really extraordinary,” Chancy said to Habib, Sun, and Espinoza.
All three finalists read from their books, and then Jim Witte of the Institute for Immigration Research announced Shahnaz Habib as the winner. Habib thanked the judges and the other finalists, saying, “I’m so grateful for this award, which makes space for all these stories that are complicated – the story about being lonely or not being a good immigrant, or of a writer who’s not even sure she’s an immigrant… Thank you for making space for that.”
Judges (back left to right) Myriam J. A. Chancy, Karin Tanabe, and V.V. Ganeshananthan, and finalists (front left to right) Carrie Sun, Shahnaz Habib, and Alex Espinoza. Photos by Aster Equine Photography.
Praise from the Judges
“With disarming humor, Shanaz Habib in Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel challenges the presupposition that people from the Global South ‘don’t travel, they immigrate.’ Through essays, both personal and well-researched, she tackles a wide range of travel-related topics from the history of passports to forests, carousels, and pickles. The realities she uncovers in the process are often as startling as they are eye-opening and reshape our sense of what it means to travel as a person from the Third World across disparate geographies, from the streets of Brooklyn to those of Istanbul. A captivating, beautifully written work that will spark many conversations.”
Previous winners of the New American Voices Award are: Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance, Melissa Rivero’s The Affairs of the Falcóns, Lysley Tenorio’s The Son of Good Fortune, Patricia Engel’s Infinite Country, Sindya Bhanoo’s Seeking Fortune Elsewhere, and Rachel Heng’s The Great Reclamation.
About the Judges
Myriam J. A. Chancy is the author of the novel Village Weavers, a Time best book of April. Her previous novel, What Storm, What Thunder, was named a best book of the year by NPR, Kirkus, Library Journal, the Boston Globe, and The Globe and Mail. Her past novels include The Loneliness of Angels, winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature Caribbean Award in Fiction and Spirit of Haiti. She is also the author of several nonfiction works, including most recently, Harvesting Haiti: Reflections on Unnatural Disasters. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and HBA Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College in California.
V. V. Ganeshananthan (she/her) is the author of the novels Brotherless Night, longlisted for the Women’s Prize and the Asian Prize, shortlisted for the Carol Shields Prize, and a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award, and Love Marriage, longlisted for the Women’s Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post. She has been visiting faculty at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and now teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota.
Karin Tanabe is the author of seven novels, including her most recent, The Sunset Crowd. A former Politico reporter, her writing has also appeared in The Washington Post, Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune, and Newsday. She is a frequent book reviewer for The Washington Post and has appeared as a celebrity and politics expert on Entertainment Tonight, CNN, and the CBS Early Show. Karin is a graduate of Vassar College and lives in Washington DC.
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