2026
Jhalak Prose Prize Winner
Diane Evans
I Want to Talk to You
(Chatto & Windus)
Diana Evans is the award-winning, bestselling author of A House for Alice, Ordinary People, The Wonder, 26a and a collection of nonfiction, I Want to Talk to You. Her prize nominations include the Guardian and Commonwealth Best First Book awards, and she was the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers. A book of the year in the New Yorker, Ordinary People received the South Bank Sky Arts Award, and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, for which A House for Alice was also shortlisted.
Shortlist
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Act Normal: Joy and Despair in Postcolonial Britain, Pete Kalu (HopeRoad)
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Call Me Ishmaelle, Xiaolu Guo (Vintage)
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Foreign Fruit, Katie Goh (Canongate)
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Hail Mary, Funmi Fetto (Magpie)
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I Want to Talk to You, Diana Evans (Chatto & Windus)
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The South, Tash Aw (Fourth Estate)
Longlist
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Act Normal: Joy and Despair in Postcolonial Britain, Pete Kalu (HopeRoad)
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Before We Hit the Ground, SelaliFiamanya (Borough Press)
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Call Me Ishmaelle, Xiaolu Guo (Vintage)
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I Want to Talk to You, Diana Evans (Chatto & Windus)
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The South, Tash Aw (Fourth Estate)
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Love Forms, Claire Adam (Faber)
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Saraswati, Gurnaik Johal (Serpent’s Tail)
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The Science of Racism: Everything you need to know but probably don’t - yet, Keon West (Picador)
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Foreign Fruit, Katie Goh (Canongate)
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Minority Rule: Culture Wars and the Rentier Class: Adventures in the Culture War, Ash Sarkar (Bloomsbury)
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Hail Mary, Funmi Fetto (Magpie)
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Shamiso, Brian Chikwava (Canongate)
