Debut author wins 2019 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction with refugees’ story
The ABA Journal reports an award for the book The Boat People by Sharon Bala. The book is the winner of the 2019 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction, the University of Alabama School of Law and ABA Journal announced yesterday.
“It’s an absolute honor to learn that The Boat People has won the 2019 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction,” Bala said in the news release. “Writing this novel was a meditation on empathy. My greatest hope is that it has the same effect on readers.”
The Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction was established in 2011 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird. It is awarded annually to a book-length work of fiction that best illuminates the role of lawyers in society and their power to effect change.
Here is more about the book:
The Boat People: A Novel by
A description of the book on Amazon.com:
Globe and Mail bestseller, The Boat People is an extraordinary novel about a group of refugees who survive a perilous ocean voyage only to face the threat of deportation amid accusations of terrorism
When a rusty cargo ship carrying Mahindan and five hundred fellow refugees from Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war reaches Vancouver’s shores, the young father thinks he and his six-year-old son can finally start a new life. Instead, the group is thrown into a detention processing center, with government officials and news headlines speculating that among the “boat people” are members of a separatist militant organization responsible for countless suicide attacks—and that these terrorists now pose a threat to Canada’s national security. As the refugees become subject to heavy interrogation, Mahindan begins to fear that a desperate act taken in Sri Lanka to fund their escape may now jeopardize his and his son’s chance for asylum.
Told through the alternating perspectives of Mahindan; his lawyer, Priya, a second-generation Sri Lankan Canadian who reluctantly represents the refugees; and Grace, a third-generation Japanese Canadian adjudicator who must decide Mahindan’s fate as evidence mounts against him, The Boat People is a spellbinding and timely novel that provokes a deeply compassionate lens through which to view the current refugee crisis.
KJ