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Jon Ransom has taken home a Polari prize for the second year running, with his second novel The Gallopers winning 2024’s overall prize for books that “push the boundaries of LGBTQ fiction.”
Last year, the author’s debut novel The Whale Tattoo won the Polari first book prize, which has this year been won by Nicola Dinan for her novel Bellies. Meanwhile Sarah Hagger-Holt has been awarded the biannual Polari children’s and YA prize for her children’s story The Fights That Make Us.
The Gallopers is an emotional thriller that tells the story of three men across 30 years, taking in the homophobia they experience and their troubled relationships with themselves. Guardian reviewer Yagnishsing Dawoor described it as “a whispered howl of a novel about men fettered by masculine norms, the ideas and pressures that curtail their freedom and the bargains they strike with others and themselves in order to live.”
Journalist Suzi Feay, who judged this year’s headline prize, praised the novel’s ability to be “by turns tender and sinister, joy-filled and apprehensive, with a sure sense of historical perspective”, adding that “for Jon Ransom to have built upon the success of his Polari prize-winning debut so speedily is admirable.”
Bellies, a novel about friendship, first love and coming out as transgender was described as being “as deep as it is chic” by Jeremy Atherton-Lin in his Guardian review. Dinan’s second novel, Disappoint Me, is due out in January.
First book prize judge writer Karen McLeod said: “Bellies is a prescient, smart novel” and “as new and original as a queer novel can be. It will open many doors and conversations: an antidote for these troubled and divisive times.”
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Polari prize founder Paul Burston chaired the judging panels for both the first book and the overall prize. “At first glance, this year’s prize-winning novels couldn’t be more different – one contemporary, the other historical; one urban, the other rural; one exploring the trans experience from a modern British, cross cultural perspective, the other looking at working-class gay lives in 1950s Norfolk,” he said. “But both push the boundaries of LGBTQ fiction; both feature the formal device of a play within the main narrative; and both explore the loves and lives of queer characters in surprising new ways.”
Hagger-Holt’s The Fights That Make Us is a story about LGBT+ history and standing up for what you believe in. Chair of judges, the children’s author Jodie Lancet-Grant, said she and her fellow judges, teacher Rayyan Aboo, writer Erica Gillingham and librarian Zoey Dixon, “adored” Hagger-Holt’s book.
“We found the way that Sarah weaves two timelines together – one around growing up in the 1980s under Section 28 and one set in the present day – effective and moving”, Lancet-Grant said.
In contention for the children’s award alongside The Fights That Make Us were Bitterthorn by Kat Dunn, Out of the Blue by Robert Tregoning, Gwen and Art are not in Love by Lex Croucher and Away With Words by Sophie Cameron. The Gallopers was up against Killing Jericho by William Hussey, The Fitful Sleep of Immigrants by Orlando Ortega-Medina, Forty Lies by David Shenton, Blue Hunger by Viola Di Grado, translated by Jamie Richards and Hard Drive by Paul Stephenson for the main prize while Bellies took the first book prize over Neon Roses by Rachel Dawson, Local Fires by Joshua Jones, Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth, Greekling by Kostya Tsolakis and Transitional by Munroe Bergdorf.
EasyJet holidays announced a three-year partnership with the Polari prizes earlier this year, and all three winners will receive a package holiday of their choice, courtesy of the airline. Ransom will also win a £2,000 cash prize from sponsors DHH Literary Agency, while Dinan will be awarded £1,000 by sponsors FMcM Associates. Hagger-Holt will receive £1,000 from sponsors Ash Literary.
Burston and McLeod judged the first book prize alongside Ransom, author Rachel Holmes and co-chair of literature charity Spread the Word Simon Richardson. For the Polari book prize, Burston and Feay were joined by CEO of the National Centre for Writing Chris Gribble, author VG Lee, 2023 Polari book prize winner Julia Armfield and Garry Wilson, CEO of easyJet holidays.
The Polari is the UK and Ireland’s only dedicated LGBTQ+ book prize, launched in 2011. It is open to books about the LGBTQIA+ experience by authors who were born or live in the UK and Ireland.
