The USA-based Indian writer Shahnaz Habib has won the 2024 New American Voices Award for her nonfiction book Airplane Mode (published in India by Westland). She will receive a cash prize of $5,000. It is an annual award given by the Institute for Immigration Research in US, recognising works that illuminate the complexity of the human experience as told by immigrants, whose work is historically underrepresented in writing and publishing.

This year’s jury comprised Myriam JA Chancy, VV Ganeshananthan, and Karin Tanabe. Finalists Carrie Sun, author of Private Equity: A Memoir, and Alex Espinoza, author of The Sons of El Rey were each awarded $1,000.

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“With disarming humour, Shahnaz Habib in Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel challenges the presupposition that people from the Global South ‘don’t travel, they immigrate.’ Through essays, both personal and well-researched, she 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. A captivating, beautifully written work that will spark many conversations,” said the judges about the book.

A review on Scroll describes Habib’s book, which has also been published in India, as “an inquisitive account of travel and its attendant histories” where she examines the sociocultural, economic and historical factors that affect various aspects of travel.

Previous winners of the New American Voices Award are Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance, Melissa Rivero’s The Affairs of the Falcóns, Lysley Tenorio’s The Son of Good Fortune, Patricia Engel’s Infinite Country, Sindya Bhanoo’s Seeking Fortune Elsewhere, and Rachel Heng’s The Great Reclamation.