The 2019 awards ceremony for one of the most prestigious awards in Punjabi literature, the Dhahan Prize, will be held on November 2, 2019 at 6 pm at The Robert H. Lee Alumni Centre, University of British Columbia, Canada.
The prize, which started in 2014, is given annually for works in the Punjabi scripts of Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi.
This prize recognizes one outstanding writer with a $25,000 award, as well as two finalists with awards of $10,000.
Forging meaningful relationships with writers, community organizations and educational institutions in Pakistan, India and the diaspora around the world , the Dhahan Prize is the world's signature prize for Punjabi literary works.
The Keynote Speaker for the 2019 awards ceremony will be Balli Kaur Jaswal, who has authored four novels, including Singapore Literature Prize finalist ‘Sugarbread’, and the bestselling ‘Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows’, which was a selection of Reese Witherspoon's book club.
Her debut novel ‘Inheritance’ won the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelist award.
A former writing fellow at the University of East Anglia, she teaches creative writing at Yale NUS College.
Jaswal's non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, Cosmopolitan.com, Harper's Bazaar India and Salon.com, among other publications.
Her latest novel ‘The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters’ was released internationally earlier this year.