Guy Gunaratne has won the Jhalak prize for writers of colour for his Man Booker prize-nominated debut In Our Mad and Furious City, a novel that unfolds over 48-hours on a London council estate and was praised by judges as “timely and important”.
Gunaratne, who worked as a journalist and documentary film-maker before turning to writing, grew up in north-west London with Sri Lankan parents. In Our Mad and Furious City, which is set during a summer of unrest that begins when an off-duty soldier is murdered by a black man, was spurred by the murder of Lee Rigby.
In a 2018 interview with the Observer, Gunaratne recalled being disturbed by a video of Rigby’s killer, Michael Adebolajo, covered in blood.
“I remember being shocked, not really by the event, but by the fact that he was talking the way I did, and was dressed the same way kids from my school were dressed. Even his mannerisms and the way he carried himself looked familiar. It was terrorism, just way too close to home … You’re not supposed to identify with monsters. Instead I wanted to refract that feeling of being disturbed through five different voices; so each character confronts their own version of extremism,” he said.
Now in its third year, the Jhalak prize was set up in 2016 by authors Sunny Singh and Nikesh Shukla, and Media Diversified to award the best book by a British or British-resident black, Asian and minority ethnic author. It was established in response to the Writing the Future report from Spread the Word in 2015, which found that only 8% of people working in British publishing self-identified as coming from a BAME background.
In 2017, Tory MP Philip Davies complained to the Equality and Human Rights Commission that the Jhalak prize breached discrimination rules, arguing that the prize was unfair to white authors and was an example of “positive discrimination”. The EHRC dismissed his complaint after an investigation, which Singh said had caused “enormous stress” and wasted resources.
Commending Gunaratne’s book, judge and author Anna Perera said, “Daring and lively to the point where the words overflow the page and hum in your head, the still measured reflection of contemporary London life feels deeply personal and revealing, fully confident and free from compromise.”
Poet Siana Bangura said it “threw me into a warm and familiar nostalgia for a London I know well”, while playwright Sabrina Mahfouz called it “the London book of our lifetime”.
“As I finished it, the only solace was knowing that it is Gunaratne’s debut – we have so much more to look forward to from him,” Mahfouz added.
Open to all forms of writing, this year’s shortlist included Raymond Antrobus’s poetry collection The Perseverance, Aminatta Forna’s novel Happiness, Onjali Q Raúf’s children’s novel The Boy at the Back of the Class, Akala’s memoir and polemic Natives, and Built by structural engineer Roma Agrawal.
Gunaratne received the £1,000 award at a ceremony on Wednesday night.
