Bangladeshi-Irish author Adiba Jaigirdar’s has won the £2,000 YA Book Prize 2022 for her “charming, relatable, funny” queer rom-com, Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating (Hachette Children’s). The announcement was made at a live ceremony at Edinburgh International Book Festival last night, chaired by poet and novelist Dean Atta.
Published in May 2021, Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating is Jaigirdar’s second book. It focuses on two very different Bengali girls - popular Hani and academic overachiever Ishu - who begin a fake relationship to both help Hani convince her friends that she is bisexual and increase Ishu’s popularity and chances of becoming head girl. Before long, they start to develop real feelings for each other, but not everyone in their lives is rooting for them. Jaigirdar told The Bookseller that the story, which she wrote the first draft of in just 30 days, was inspired by “a lot of media I watched when I was younger, where queer relationships were often only portrayed with tragic endings; usually with one of the characters dying”.
She added: “I was very tired of consuming this kind of media and I think it does so much damage to young queer kids who begin to internalise that they are only capable of having tragic endings to their love stories. So I wanted to write this book, which utilises one of the most popular rom-com tropes, gives it to two queer Bengali girls, and lets them have their happily ever after.”
Jaigirdar said she was “honoured and excited” to be nominated for the award, expanding: “Bengali people have a long and important history in the United Kingdom but sadly we are very lacking in literature in general. I feel honoured that I got to write this story about two Bengalis, and even more honoured that their story is being recognised by the YA Book Prize and by audiences in the UK.”
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Fellow Irish author and reviewer Sarah Webb, who was on this year’s judging panel, said: “Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating is an outstanding YA novel and a highly deserving winner of the YA Book Prize 2022.” She described it as a “charming, relatable, funny book about family, friendship and relationships” and added: “Jaigirdar’s characters are so real they jump off the page and her dialogue crackles with life and authenticity. I loved the contemporary Irish setting too!”
Fellow judge Joel Rochester said: “Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating truly defines the potential of Young Adult literature within the UK and Ireland - not only does it deliver such a sweet narrative between two main characters, but it also makes subtle commentaries about racism and white victimhood, which were integrated into the story with nuance and finesse. Adiba Jaigirdar has solidified herself as a strong voice in YA, and I’m excited to see the other stories she puts out in the future.”
The judging panel was chaired by The Bookseller’s children’s editor and deputy features editor Caroline Carpenter, who said: “Every year, the YA Book Prize judges are given the near-impossible task of choosing a winner from the boldest and best YA fiction from the UK and Ireland, and the 2022 list was no different. I’m delighted that the judges chose to crown Adiba Jaigirdar’s delightful rom-com, which puts a fresh spin on the popular ‘fake dating’ YA trope by balancing skilled storytelling with a nuanced exploration of issues such as friendship and otherness, in a tale filled with humour and heart.”
Jaigirdar was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and has been living in Dublin since the age of 10. She has a BA in English and history and an MA in postcolonial studies. She is an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher. Her debut, The Henna Wars, another queer young adult rom-com, was released in May 2020.
In an essay published in The Irish Times last year, Jaigirdar wrote: “I think the books that I am writing would have been immensely helpful to my younger self, who was trying to navigate being this very specific identity that nobody else seemed to have. Being Bangladeshi and Irish, queer and Muslim, and many other things outside of that too. I often write thinking of the books that I didn’t have when I was younger. The stories that might have helped shape me differently. That may have helped me love myself and who I was at a younger age rather than deep into my adulthood. So that’s why I write the books that I do. The ones that give queer brown girls their happy endings, even if they don’t always look like the happy endings we may expect.”
Her first historical novel A Million to One, which follows four friends who manage to sneak aboard the “Titanic” to pull off “the heist of their lives”, will be published next January by Hachette, followed next June by Dos and Donuts of Love, which sees a girl enter a baking show where she is competing against an ex-girlfriend as well as her new crush.
The YA Book Prize was launched by The Bookseller in 2014 to celebrate books for teenagers and young adults from the UK and Ireland. Past winners include Louise O’Neill, Patrice Lawrence and Juno Dawson.
