Indian American Author Shahnaz Habib Wins New American Voices Award
- The nonfiction book "Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel" is described as “a personal and cultural history of tourism from the perspective of a Third World-raised Muslim woman for whom travel has always been a complicated pleasure.”
Indian American author Shahnaz Habib has won the 7th Annual New American Voices Award for her nonfiction book “Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel.” The post-publication book prize recognizes recently published works that illuminate the complexity of the human experience as told by immigrants, whose work is historically underrepresented in writing and publishing.
Habib received her $5,000 prize on Oct. 17 at the George Mason’s Center in Fairfax, Virginia. She was joined by finalists Carrie Sun, author of “Private Equity: A Memoir” and Alex Espinoza, author of “The Sons of El Rey,” as well as judges Myriam J. A. Chancy, V. V. Ganeshananthan, and Karin Tanabe to talk about the power and diversity of these stories.
In their opening conversation about the selection process, the judges praised the strengths they saw in the over 70 submissions to this year’s award. The books that most stood out “were all taking great risks, they were all very bold, and in ways that I hadn’t always realized you could be,” said Ganeshananthan. Tanabe mentioned the stereotype of the “good immigrant” and how all of the longlist and shortlist books challenged this narrative. “You have broken molds, and that’s why we’re celebrating you tonight. We really want to congratulate you, because what you’ve done is really extraordinary,” Chancy said to Habib, Sun, and Espinoza.
Catapult Books, who published “Airplane Mode,” describes it as “a personal and cultural history of tourism from the perspective of a Third World-raised Muslim woman for whom travel has always been a complicated pleasure.” It “traces the history of tourism, as a Euro-American mode of consumerism, while also charting her own personal journeys through which Habib earned to question who gets to travel and who gets to write about travel.”
According to the Fall for the Book website, Habib’s book “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 website says. “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.”
Habib is the translator of the novel “Jasmine Days,” for which she and the author Benyamin won the JCB Prize, India’s most valuable prize for literature. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker online, Creative Nonfiction, Agni, Brevity, The Guardian, and Afar. She has twice been awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Artists’ Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature, and her work has been cited in the Best American Essays series multiple times.
Born and raised in Kerala, Habib earned her BA from Mahatma Gandhi University, an MA in English Literature from the University of Delhi, and an MA in Media Studies from the New School. She teaches writing at The New School and Bay Path University, and consults for the United Nations. She has also worked as an Associate Press Officer for the United Nations and as a translator for the Southern Poverty Law Center. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family.
