For the first time this year, the Booksellers Association who run the Books are my Bag campaign, supporting British bookshops has hosted the BAMB Readers Awards and on Thursday night the first ever winner of the award was announced.
The Good Immigrant, edited by Nikesh Shulkas won the public vote from the shortlist and collected Thursday night’s award, and while little was known about the collection of essays until a few months ago, it’s beaten J. K. Rowling and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child to the top spot!
The collection of essays was published by Unbound in September and explores why immigrants come to the UK, why they stay, what it means to be mixed race, and how it feels to be made unwelcome in the place you call home. With 50,000 votes cast for the inaugural Books are My Bag Readers Award, it’s a worthy winner and given the slide of negativity towards immigrants it’s a timely win too.
The Good Immigrant was designed to give a platform to British authors of colour who aren’t represented through mainstream publishers, and it was hoped from concept that the stories might show a different side of the narrative. There’s no denying that around the Western World the anti-immigrant rhetoric has been vicious and toxic and The Good Immigrant gives a voice to the ‘others’.
That said, Nikesh Shulkas was keen to point out that this is a collection of essays on life, not a political manifesto. The book is just stories from immigrants in their own voices. The narrative around immigration s never owned by immigrants, despite it being their story to tell, and The Good Immigrant redresses that in what is now likely to be one of the best selling books of the year.
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