2024 Neustadt International Prize for Literature
Born in Mauritius, 2024 Neustadt Prize laureate Ananda Devi won a prize in an international short-story competition at the age of fifteen. She published her first collection of short-stories at the age of nineteen. Over the next five decades, she has become one of the major literary voices of the Indian Ocean with thirty books, including novels, collections of poetry, short stories, and essays.
Published by major French publishers, she has won numerous literary prizes. Her writing is characterized by an unflinching look at violence and modern society, especially with regard to the status of women. Her characters are trapped by the contrary forces of society, religion, identity, human cruelty, and the seismic faults of history. Their only recourse, in their solitary quest, is their lucidity and humanity. Despite the harshness of her themes, Devi brings to her writing a poetry and sensuality that shines a light in the midst of the darkness she explores.
Devi has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has received decorations from Mauritius and also from France, with the title of Officier des Arts et des Lettres. In 2014 she received a major award from the Académie Française. The University of Silesia, Poland, conferred upon her a doctorate honoris causa. She was awarded the Neustadt Prize for her body of work in 2024.
Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. His books encompass multiple genres, including several volumes of poetry, novels, and translations. He is currently professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego. His newest books are a volume of three long poems entitled The Voice of Sheila Chandra and a memoir of his Canadian childhood, Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water.
Born in 1947 in Mauritius, Harrikrisna Anenden studied medical photography in London and worked at the Institute of Cancer Research before returning to Mauritius to work as a photographer and as a technical officer at the University of Mauritius. He went back to London in 1976 to study the technique of filmmaking at the London Film School and film criticism at the University of London. He worked for twenty-five years as a documentary filmmaker for the World Health Organization, during which time he traveled around the world to make sensitization and health education films on various subjects. He won the Freddie Health and Medical Film Awards in the USA in 2004 for his film on Buruli ulcer entitled The Mystery Disease. After his retirement, he directed three feature films based on Ananda Devi’s books (one of which he co-directed with their son, Sharvan Anenden) and a documentary on traditional sari weaving in India. He now resides in France with Ananda Devi, to whom he is married. These films have been shown in film festivals around the world and won several awards, including at the FESPACO film festival in Burkina Faso.
Nidhi Chanani is an award-winning author and illustrator of over a dozen books. She was born in Kolkata, India, and raised in California. She holds a degree in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2012 she was honored by the Obama administration as a Champion of Change. Her graphic novels include Pashmina, Jukebox, Super Boba Café, and the Shark Princess series. She wrote and illustrated the picture book What will my story be? She’s illustrated a number of picture books, including I will be fierce, Strong and Binny’s Diwali. Nidhi lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her family.
Will Evans is an award-winning publisher, writer, translator, bookstore owner, professor, and literary arts advocate. In 2013 he founded Deep Vellum, a nonprofit publishing house and bookstore dedicated to bringing the world into conversation through literature. He was awarded CLMP’s Golden Colophon Award for Paradigm Independent Publishing in 2019, was accepted to the Texas Institute of Letters in 2022, became a Fellow of the Dallas Institute of Humanities & Culture in 2023, and was knighted by France as a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters in 2024. He teaches courses on publishing and Russian literature at the University of Texas at Dallas and SMU. A native of Wilmington, North Carolina, he lives in East Dallas with his wife and two children. (Photo by Mike Brooks, Dallas Observer)
Susan Fletcher has written twelve novels for kids and young adults, including Shadow Spinner, the Dragon Chronicles, Journey of the Pale Bear, and her latest, Sea Change, due out from Abrams next spring. Her books have been translated into nine languages and include a Golden Kite Honor Book as well as ALA Notable Books, ALA Best Books for Young Adults, BCCB Blue Ribbon Books, and School Library Journal Best Books. Susan taught for many years in the MFA in Writing for Children program at Vermont College. She lives in Bryan, Texas, with her husband and their dog, Neville.
Guadalupe García McCall is the national bestselling, award-winning author of several young adult novels, some short stories for adults, and many poems. Guadalupe has received the prestigious Pura Belpré Award, a Westchester Young Adult Fiction Award, the Tomás Rivera Mexican-American Children’s Book Award, among many other accolades. Guadalupe is currently affiliate faculty in the MFA Creative Writing program at Antioch University LA. She is working on four novels coming from Bloomsbury and Tu Books (2024–2027). Her recent works include the gothic borderland novel Echoes of Grace and the romantasies Secret of the Moon Conch and Hearts of Fire and Snow, both of which she co-wrote with friend and colleague Dr. David Bowles.
Varian Johnson is the author of several novels for children and young adults, including The Parker Inheritance, which won both Coretta Scott King Author Honor and Boston Globe/Horn Book Honor awards; The Great Green Heist, an ALA Notable Children’s book and Kirkus Reviews Best Book; and the graphic novel Twins, illustrated by Shannon Wright, an NPR Best Book. Varian received a BS in civil engineering from the University of Oklahoma and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. He lives outside of Austin, Texas, with his family.
Andreea Marculescu, an assistant professor of French at the University of Oklahoma, works on late-medieval and early-modern French literature with published work and research interests in pre-modern demonology (witchcraft, magic, demonic possession, and vampires), emotions, and performance studies. She is currently writing a monograph entitled Fictions of Witchcraft in Early-Modern French Literature and co-editing a volume of essays entitled MLA Options for Teaching Emotions in Literature.
Magdalena Mora is a Chicago- and Minneapolis-based illustrator, designer, and art educator. She’s illustrated numerous award-winning books including Stephen Briseño’s The Notebook Keeper, Claudia Guadalupe Martínez’s Still Dreaming / Seguimos Soñando, and Elana K. Arnold’s The Fish of Small Wishes. Her work has been recognized by the New York Times, the American Library Association, and the Chicago Public Library, among others.
Kate Rafiq is an award winning children’s author and illustrator, currently living in Wales (UK) with her husband and four children. So far, she has written, illustrated, and published three books: Birmingham Boy, The World Is Your Masjid (which has been translated into Indonesian), and We Are Here. Kate is currently working on her next picture book while running operations for Dune Books, her tiny independent publishing house. Kate sends her books to booksellers in multiple countries around the world, including New Zealand, the US, South Africa, and Indonesia.
Danny Ramadan is a Syrian-Canadian author and LGBTQ-refugees advocate. His memoir, Crooked Teeth, comes out in May 2024. His latest novel, The Foghorn Echoes, won the Lambda Award for Gay Fiction and was nominated for the BC & Yukon Book awards and the city of Vancouver Book Award. The Clothesline Swing is translated to multiple languages. His award-winning children’s books The Salma Series continues to receive accolades. Salma the Syrian Chef has garnered over seventeen awards and nominations; Salma Writes a Book won the prestigious Publishing Triangle Award 2024.
Sabaa Tahir is a former newspaper editor who grew up in California’s Mojave Desert at her family’s eighteen-room motel. There, she spent her time devouring fantasy novels, listening to thunderous indie rock, and playing guitar and piano badly. Her #1 New York Times bestselling An Ember in the Ashes series has been translated into more than thirty-five languages, and the first book in the series was named one of Time’s 100 Best Young Adult Books of All Time. Tahir’s most recent novel, All My Rage, won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Printz Medal, and the 2022 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for Fiction and Poetry.
Lauren Tamaki is a Canadian illustrator and designer. She loves acrylic ink, pencils, and watercolor paper. Her clients include the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Pentagram, Penguin, the New Yorker, and Disney. She is honored to have been recognized by the Society of Illustrators, Society of News Design, American Illustration, and the National Magazine Awards. Her book with Elizabeth Partridge, Seen and Unseen: What Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake, and Ansel Adams’s Photographs Reveal About the Japanese American Incarceration, received a Sibert Medal in 2023.
Julie-Françoise Tolliver is associate professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, specializing in twentieth-century and contemporary world literature and film. Her research focuses on environmental humanities, francophone studies, Canadian studies, American studies, postcolonial studies, and world literature and cinema. She is currently completing her second book, titled “Burning History: Fire in North American Literature and Film,” which provides a much-needed humanistic examination of North America’s wildfire crisis.
Jeffrey Zuckerman is a French translator, most notably of Ananda Devi’s prose. His translation of Eve Out of Her Ruins won the CLMP Firecracker Prize, and The Living Days was a finalist for the French-American Foundation translation prize. He is currently translating Devi’s Eat the Other and The Laugh of the Goddesses for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In 2020 he was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. (Photo by Carl de Souza)
