The Kavya Prize
The Kavya Prize aims to celebrate published work and new writing by Scotland’s ethnically diverse communities.
Founded by Indian-born Scottish author Leela Soma, the prize, in association with the Creative Writing Programme at the University of Glasgow, seeks to recognise and encourage writers of colour who are Scottish by birth, residence or formation.
In 2023 the Kavya Prize is focusing on new writers under The Kavya New Writers Award. The prize will be awarded in November 2023 and is worth £500. We are currently open for submissions; please see the Terms and Conditions below for more information.
In 2024, we aim to focus once again on full-length, published works.
Kavya is a popular and well recognised word in Sanskrit and refers to a literary style or a completed body of literature that was used in Indian courts of the Maharajahs who nurtured the cultural arts in India.
Kayva Prize 2023 Winner
The Physics of It (Non-Fiction Excerpt)
Q Manivannan (They/Them) is a Tamil writer based in Scotland, where they write about care and grief. As an academic and activist, they have worked for nearly a decade on gender-based violence, discriminatory citizenship laws, queer inclusion, disability, and higher education access. As a writer, they are often yearning. Q pursues an ESRC-funded PhD in International Relations with the University of St Andrews, performing an ethnography of hearth-keeping in Indian protests, asking who does the work of resistance, who remembers, and who forgets the afterlives of conflict.
Kayva Prize 2023 Winner
Cocoon (Short Story Collection)
Jinling Wu (She/Her) is a Chinese bilingual writer of short stories and plays as well as a filmmaker based in Edinburgh. She has received a creator’s award from We Are Here Scotland on writing, the best first-time author award for a self-published novella from Douban in China and participated in Creating Space Writers’ Group with Traverse Theatre. She has studied filmmaking in Prague, Lisbon, Tallinn, and Edinburgh and made a number of short films, both in the UK and internationally.
Kayva Prize 2023 Highly Commended
Hummingbird (Non-Fiction Essay)
Theresa Muñoz (She/Her) was born in Vancouver, Canada to Filipino parents and lives in Edinburgh. She is Director of the Newcastle Poetry Festival and Research Associate at Newcastle University. She has also managed several literary initiatives through the Newcastle Centre for Literary Arts, including the James Berry Poetry Prize, the first prize in the UK to offer mentoring and debut publication to emerging writers of colour. In 2022 she shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Sky Arts Prize for her creative non-fiction. She has published one collection of poetry, Settle, which shortlisted for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared on BBC Radio Scotland and in several international journals including Canadian Literature, PoetryReview and Southwords. She has won the Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship, Muriel Spark Centenary Award and a Creative Scotland Award. Her second poetry collection will be published in 2025.
Kayva Prize 2023 Highly Commended
1986 (Novel Excerpt)
Tae Song (she/her) is a Korean novelist, playwright, and performer. She holds both an MLitt Theatre Studies and an MLitt Creative Writing from University of Glasgow. She is also in the second year of a Doctor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at University of Glasgow, which is co-supervised by the Scottish Centre for Korean Studies at University of Edinburgh. Tae’s work explores the themes of colonialism, politics, intergenerational trauma, and the Korean diaspora through the lens of the magical realism genre and was recently featured at the 2022 “Korean Youth: Spaces, Ecologies, and Technologies” conference. She will also be presenting her work at the “Before, Behind, Beyond the Wave: Korean Popular Culture in Perspective” symposium in Leuven, Belgium this autumn. Tae’s review of Yu Miri’s The End of August will appear in the upcoming February 2024 issue of The Mekong Review. Tae is proud to be an advocate and an ally to people who have Down’s syndrome, their families, and their friends. www.taesong.co.uk; Instagram/Twitter: @taesongstories
Kavya Prize 2023 Shortlisted Authors
Amira Al Shanti – The Witch of Womanhood (Short Story
Amira Al Shanti (she/her) – The Witch of Womanhood (Short Story)
Amira Al Shanti is a Scottish Palestinian writer, actor and singer. Her work has been published in The Herald and the online zine Dardishi. She also wrote and starred in the short film 'Said the Dove to the Olive Tree' (Interabang Productions) and followed this up with a spoken word piece at the Take One Action Film Festival 2022. Recent performance credits include her West End debut in the world premiere of Rumi at the London Coliseum; and providing Arabic voiceover work in the National Theatre of Scotland's screenplay adaptation of Adam (BBC Scotland). Amira has recently completed a doctorate in Psychology and has had publications of her work in scientific journals. She received a YWCA Scotland 30 under 30 reward in 2020.
Samia Chandraker – Minerva Street (Short Story)
Samia Chandraker (she/her) – Minerva Street (Short Story)
Samia Chandraker is a second-generation Pakistani who was born and raised in Scotland. She now lives and works near Boston, USA practicing as an immigration lawyer with a background in civil liberties. She is currently working on a novel combining magic realism with contemporary events, drawing on her experiences growing up in an immigrant Pakistani family in Scotland. She has developed her interest in creative writing as a member of the Dream Thieves writing group, where she workshops her other works-in-progress that include personal essays, short stories, and a non-fiction book. Samia likes to experiment with writing that blurs boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, fantasy and reality, and religion and politics. She graduated from the University of Glasgow in Scotland, and Harvard Law School, USA.
Samina Chaudry – Belonging Neither to These nor Those
Samina Chaudry (she/her) – Belonging Neither to These nor Those (Novel Excerpt)
Samina Chaudhry is a Pakistani Scotland-based writer. She was born in Manchester, moved to London, and then to Lahore, Pakistan, from where she completed her Masters degree in English Literature. Samina was awarded The Next Chapter Award 2019 at Scottish Book Trust. Her fiction has been published in several anthologies as well as online. Currently, she is editing her novel that interrogates the experiences of being an immigrant, womanhood, and displacement. She is also working on her second novel which is about belonging and primarily an exploration of a mother-daughter relationship. She is one of the editors of the Scottish PEN writers-in-Exile Committee’s online magazine PENing.
Josephine Jay – Laowai
Josephine Jay (she/her) – Laowai (Novel Excerpt)
Josephine Jay is a freelancer artist and writer based in Edinburgh. She is 1/3 of the Whatever Next? adoption project and has appeared on BBC Radio Scotland, LBC and STV, pulling from her experiences as an adoptee from China. She was short-listed for the Jessica George Bursary 2023, Jewish Book Week Emerging Writers Programme 2023 and awarded the Eilean Shona Writing Scholarship 2023. She is currently working on her first novel with help from Malachy Tallack’s mentorship programme.
Yasmin Hanif – The Bear with No Name
Yasmin Hanif (she/her) – The Bear with No Name (Children’s Story)
Yasmin is a Scottish Pakistani writer and educator, specialising in children's literature. Her first poem, 'Daisy's Mum' was published by Cranachan Publishing in their 'Stay at Home' anthology, followed by her poem, 'Partition' in the Scottish BPOC Writers Mixtape and Beyond the Battlefield anthologies. She has worked extensively with St. Albert's Primary School tackling the lack of diversity in children's literature through the 'We Can Be Heroes' project, which won an accolade of awards including the Scottish Awards for Minority Ethnic Educators Aspiring Writers Award and The Scottish Education Curriculum Innovation Award.
Q – The Physics of It
Q (they/them) – The Physics of It (Non-Fiction Excerpt)
Q is a Tamil writer based in Scotland, where they write about care and grief. As an academic and activist, they have worked for nearly a decade on gender-based violence, discriminatory citizenship laws, queer inclusion, disability, and higher education access. As a writer, they are often yearning. Q pursues an ESRC-funded PhD in International Relations with the University of St Andrews, performing an ethnography of hearth-keeping in Indian protests, asking who does the work of resistance, who remembers, and who forgets the afterlives of conflict.
Theresa Muñoz – Hummingbird
Theresa Muñoz (she/her) – Hummingbird (Non-Fiction Essay)
Theresa Muñoz was born in Vancouver, Canada to Filipino parents and lives in Edinburgh. She is Director of the Newcastle Poetry Festival and Research Associate at Newcastle University. She has also managed several literary initiatives through the Newcastle Centre for Literary Arts, including the James Berry Poetry Prize, the first prize in the UK to offer mentoring and debut publication to emerging writers of colour. In 2022 she shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Sky Arts Prize for her creative non-fiction. She has published one collection of poetry, Settle, which shortlisted for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared on BBC Radio Scotland and in several international journals including Canadian Literature, PoetryReview and Southwords. She has won the Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship, Muriel Spark Centenary Award and a Creative Scotland Award. Her second poetry collection will be published in 2025.
Tae Song – 1986
Tae Song (she/her)– 1986 (Novel Excerpt)
Tae Song (she/her) is a Korean novelist, playwright, and performer. She holds both an MLitt Theatre Studies and an MLitt Creative Writing from University of Glasgow. She is also in the second year of a Doctor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at University of Glasgow, which is co-supervised by the Scottish Centre for Korean Studies at University of Edinburgh. Tae’s work explores the themes of colonialism, politics, intergenerational trauma, and the Korean diaspora through the lens of the magical realism genre and was recently featured at the 2022 “Korean Youth: Spaces, Ecologies, and Technologies” conference. She will also be presenting her work at the “Before, Behind, Beyond the Wave: Korean Popular Culture in Perspective” symposium in Leuven, Belgium this autumn. Tae’s review of Yu Miri’s The End of August will appear in the upcoming February 2024 issue of The Mekong Review. Tae is proud to be an advocate and an ally to people who have Down’s syndrome, their families, and their friends.
Jinling Wu – Cocoon
Jinling Wu (she/her)– Cocoon (Short Story Collection)
Jinling Wu is a Chinese bilingual writer of short stories and plays as well as a filmmaker based in Edinburgh. She has received a creator’s award from We Are Here Scotland on writing, the best first-time author award for a self-published novella from Douban in China and participated in Creating Space Writers’ Group with Traverse Theatre. She has studied filmmaking in Prague, Lisbon, Tallinn, and Edinburgh and made a number of short films, both in the UK and internationally.
Alexandra Ye – This Story
Alexandra Ye (she/her) – This Story (Short Story)
Alexandra Ye is a Chinese-American writer living in Edinburgh, where she completed a MSc in creative writing. Her short stories appear in Extra Teeth and The Offing.
Meet the Judges
Caro Clarke
Caro Clarke
Caro Clarke is the founder of Portobello Literary, a literary agency based in Edinburgh, and the Chair of the Association of Scottish Literary Agents. In 2021 they won Rights Professional of the Year at the British Book Awards. They co-founded the Nan Shepherd Prize for underrepresented nature writers.
T.L. Huchu
T.L. Huchu
T.L. Huchu’s work has appeared in 'Lightspeed', 'Interzone', 'Analog Science Fiction & Fact', 'The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021’, 'Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine', 'Mystery Weekly', 'The Year’s Best Crime and Mystery Stories 2016', and elsewhere. He is the winner of an Alex Award (2022), the Children’s Africana Book Award (2021), a Nommo Award for African SFF (2022, 2017), and has been shortlisted for the Caine Prize (2014) and the Grand prix de l'Imaginaire (2019). “The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle”, the third instalment in his Edinburgh Nights fantasy series, is due out in summer 2023. @TendaiHuch
Uma Nada-Rajah
Uma Nada-Rajah
Uma Nada-Rajah won the 2022 Kavya Prize for her work Toy Plastic Chicken. She is a playwright based in Kirknewton, Scotland, was one of the BBC’s Scottish Voices 2020, and was recently the Starter Female Political Comedy writer-in-residence at the National Theatre of Scotland. Her 2022 play Exodus premiered at the Traverse Theatre last August.
Kavya Prize 2022 Winner
‘Toy Plastic Chicken’ by Uma Nada-Rajah, A Play and a Pint (Salamander Street)
Uma Nada-Rajah (She/Her) is a playwright based in Kirknewton, Scotland and is of Sri Lankan Tamil heritage. She is one of the BBC's Scottish Voices 2020 and was most recently the Starter Female Political Comedy writer-in-residence at the National Theatre of Scotland. Uma is a graduate of École Philippe Gaulier and a previous participant of the Royal Court's Young Writers' Programme and the Traverse Theatre's Young Writers' Programme. In 2014 Uma won the New Playwrights Award from Playwrights’ Studio Scotland. She works as a staff nurse with NHS Scotland.
“I am really touched (and still in shock!) to have been awarded the inaugural Kavya Prize. My respect to all of the organisers and contributors for nurturing a sense of community in the celebration of diverse Scottish voices. Congratulations to all the shortlisted writers.” - Uma Nada-Rajah
“Uma Nada-Rajah’s play, Toy Plastic Chicken had me hooked from the start and I could immediately envisage it enacted on stage to a mesmerised audience. The toy chicken provides the dark humour that intensifies and exposes the absurdity of the situation. Based on a true story, the play resonates with the audience as it is a familiar scenario. It is funny and compelling , making it a hugely successful play that needs to be read and staged again and again.” - Dr Bashabi Fraser
''Toy Plastic Chicken by Uma Nada-Rajah grabbed my attention from the very first start. Intelligent, bold and hilarious it tells a story of our time - how an innocent toy can turn into a terrorist threat at airport security. While reading it, I forgot that I was judging and wanted to grab others and urge them to read it too. Unanimously chosen by all the judges, this is an exciting win, a striking, clever drama on the effects of security rules on both travelers and the staff who must implement them.'' - Leila Aboulela
"Toy Plastic Chicken is written with a sense of playfulness whilst addressing a topical issue. Inviting the reader/audience into a situation of absurdity, hilarity and frustration, the author manages to keep the us engaged with the characters on a human level, despite how we may feel towards them." - Tawona Sithole
