Habib wins New American Voices Award

On Thursday, Oct. 17, during the 2024 Fall for the Book festival, three finalists, three judges, and a group of readers gathered at George Mason University’s Center for the Arts to celebrate the seventh annual Institute for Immigration Research New American Voices Award.

Shahnaz Habib, author of Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel, was awarded this year’s top prize of $5,000. Finalists Carrie Sun, author of Private Equity: A Memoir, and Alex Espinoza, author of The Sons of El Rey were each awarded $1,000.

The New American Voices Award was created in 2018 by Fall for the Book and Mason’s Institute for Immigration Research (IIR) to recognize recently published works that illuminate the complexity of the human experience as told by immigrants, whose work is historically underrepresented in writing and publishing. IIR Director Jim Witte announced the award.

This year’s judges—Myriam J. A. Chancy, V. V. Ganeshananthan, and Karin Tanabe—praised the strengths they saw in the 70+ submissions to this year’s contest. 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 the longlist and shortlist books challenged this narrative. 

Habib is a writer and translator based in Brooklyn, New York. She translates from her mother tongue, the south Indian language of Malayalam, and has translated two novels. Airplane Mode is her first book.

The judges praised Habib’s book: “Through essays, both personal and well-researched, [Habib] 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.”

Fall for the Book is Northern Virginia’s oldest and largest festival of literature and the arts. All events are free and open to the public thanks to the generous support of sponsors including the Fairfax County Public Library, George Mason University, the Fairfax Library Foundation, and the City of Fairfax.