Young Muslim writers awards: celebrating a more diverse creative voice

Fourteen-year-old Shebana Khan, from Walthamstow, north London, writes poetry in her spare time as a way to express herself. She might be softly spoken, but she certainly doesn’t hold back. When she recites her poetry, she speaks quickly and rhythmically, punching the air to accentuate her words. She is a pupil at the Lammas school […]

Fourteen-year-old Shebana Khan, from Walthamstow, north London, writes poetry in her spare time as a way to express herself. She might be softly spoken, but she certainly doesn’t hold back. When she recites her poetry, she speaks quickly and rhythmically, punching the air to accentuate her words.
She is a pupil at the Lammas school and sixth form in Waltham Forest, one of London’s most deprived boroughs, and has performed her poetry at the Houses of Parliament. Earlier this year she entered one of her poems, The Circus of Lies, into the Young Muslim Writers awards.
It begins: “I was the lie master / From white lies to black lies / And everything within.” Shebana says she wrote the poem when she was going through a rough time with school, friends and family: “Writing makes me feel as if I can pour out my heart. It makes me feel as if all the troubles can be eased with as little as a pen and paper. It makes me feel alive.”
Shebana will find out whether her poem has won an award at a ceremony which takes place at the University of London’s Senate House. The awards, open to children aged five to 16, are in two categories – short stories and poetry – with four winners from different age groups per category. This year there were 500 entries, and Shebana is one of 40 children to have been shortlisted.
The entrants had to work hard to impress the panel of more than 30 judges, including Louis de Bernières, Tim Bowler, Wendy Cope, Roopa Farooki, Selma Dabbagh and Gillian Clarke.
Now in its fifth year, the Young Muslim Writers awards offer a rare opportunity to celebrate the creative successes of young Muslim schoolchildren. They are organised by the Nottingham-based charity Muslim Hands, which works on supporting marginalised and abused women, and helping with food banks and soup kitchens. The children’s awards used to be part of a wider writing competition supported by Penguin, and included prizes for adults. In 2010, the charity decided to focus on the children’s awards as a way to encourage learning, reading and writing.
 “Every child matters and every child deserves to be educated, regardless of faith, race and colour,” says Maqsood Ahmed, the director of community development for Muslim Hands. “But Muslim children are disproportionately disadvantaged for so many reasons, from their family’s financial position to overcrowding at home and a lack of access to books or the internet. These children need to feel like they are valued and they need to feel proud of the work they achieve.”
Ahmed says the awards are open to all. “We would never exclude a child of any other faith or no faith from entering. In a way, our charity’s name doesn’t reflect the work we do because we don’t discriminate and we work with people of all backgrounds.” He says there’s nothing political about the initiative. “This is just about education and creativity for us.”
At a time when schools are being told to watch for signs of radicalism and when some Muslim pupils might feel scared to speak their mind for fear of being misunderstood, it seems more important than ever to allow children a space to articulate themselves away from the discourse of terrorism, oppression and negativity that they may hear or read in the media.
“The Muslim children that I work with feel unfairly stereotyped. They know that some people will judge them and treat them differently because of their background or, in some cases, because they wear a headscarf. They feel pigeonholed,” says Cat Brogan, a performance poet and a teacher at Shebana’s school. She submitted nearly 40 entries to the awards, and two of her pupils were shortlisted, including Shebana. “Writing, especially poetry, gives them a chance to say who they really are and how they really feel, away from what the media says. It’s so incredibly important that they have this opportunity to be recognised because when would they otherwise get a chance?”
The shortlisted entries vary widely. There’s a story about a girl who gets lost in a supermarket and can’t find her mother, a fast-paced thriller about a mysterious will, and a poem written by a 13-year-old girl which criticises the unjust treatment of workers in Dubai, contrasting their hardship with the luxury of Gucci-clad crowds.
 “Statistics have shown that in the UK, the academic achievements of children from Bangladeshi and Pakistani backgrounds are lower than that of their counterparts. These children tend to belong to the Muslim faith,” says Zainub Chohan, a project manager at Muslim Hands who has helped organise this year’s awards. “This is a way to empower young people to reach their potential. It provides a means for them to have their work read by accomplished authors, people they may have looked up to. In turn, it raises their aspirations and ambitions, it makes a career in literature and the arts more tangible.”
In a week when so much has been said about the depressing lack of diversity  in the publishing world, it seems particularly urgent to encourage children of minority ethnic backgrounds to pursue their writing dreams. Ahmed says: “Thirty years ago, I couldn’t find any young Muslims writing in the UK. But now they are. Some of these children come from really deprived backgrounds and some of them don’t have the encouragement they need, whether that’s from their parents or their schools. But when they come to Senate House for the awards, it’s like they can see there is a life ahead of them where they can achieve amazing things. You can see the glow on their faces. And that’s one way of making a difference in the future.”
Another way of making a difference is to encourage children of all backgrounds to write about their experiences. “Without stories about minority ethnic communities, it is far too easy to be dehumanised at the convenience of different groups,” says children’s author Rukhsana Khan, who also judged this year’s awards and whose story Big Red Lollipop was chosen by the New York Public Library as one of the 100 greatest children’s books in the last 100 years. “When I think of young writers, I think of Anne Frank, whose simple diary led a whole world into realising that the Jews they’d been demonising were just like everyone else. Good literature can do that. It can humanise the ‘other’. Every little bit helps.”

Culled from Guardian.com