As announced this morning in Literary Hub, we’re delighted that Praveen Herat is the winner of the 2022 Prize for New Immigrant Writing. His brilliant, propulsive international thriller Between This World and the Next is forthcoming in 2024. Congratulations, Praveen!

Prize judges Tiphanie Yanique, Deepak Unnikrishnan, and Ilan Stavans write, “Between This World and the Next tells the story of Fearless, a burnt British war photographer and Song, a Cambodian woman who has been physically and psychologically beset by the violence in her country…. Praveen Herat challenges our own complicity as passive observers when exposed to a constant stream of media depicting suffering across the world and asks what we truly know about anyone, even the people we hold dearest.” Read the full judges’ citation.

Praveen Herat on Between This World and the Next

Praveen Herat was born in London to Sri Lankan parents and educated in the UK, where he graduated from University of East Anglia’s Creative Writing MA. He lived and worked for several years in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and has lived in Paris for the past decade.

“On my first morning in Cambodia in 2004, I pulled back the curtain of my hotel room window to see two men haggling over the contents of a car’s trunk: a gun that, even with my limited knowledge, I recognized as an AK-47. Whether in the hands of a Tamil Tiger at the Battle of Jaffna in Sri Lanka, my country of origin, or strapped to the chests of guerrillas in the Second Chechen War, was there a more ubiquitous object in the news—then or now? How and why had this particular weapon proliferated in every corner of the globe? As a writer, I felt that this was my territory; above all, I am interested in what is everywhere around us but rarely spoken about.” Read Praveen Herat on his winning novel.