Ahead of the May 13 announcement of this year’s winner, Q&Q caught up with Eleanor Catton, Claudia Dey, and Janika Oza to find what significance the prize has for them and what stories they sought to tell in their shortlisted novels.

Ahead of the May 13 announcement of this year’s winner, Q&Q caught up with Eleanor Catton, Claudia Dey, and Janika Oza to find what significance the prize has for them and what stories they sought to tell in their shortlisted novels.
Rebecca Hirsch Garcia was one of the first-round mentees in spring 2021, and she was paired with in-house ECW editor Jen Albert.
The Spirits Have Nothing to Do with Us brings together nine stories from both emerging and published writers including Anna Ling Kaye, Lydia Kwa, Eddy Boudel Tan, Isabella Wang, and Bingji Ye, whose story is translated by Woo himself.
2AM Eternal: A Decade of Queer Nightlife Posters + Comics will be published in a large format paperback on May 30, by New York state–based press Secret Acres.
The five writers shortlisted for the prize hail from different parts of the continent and their books differ widely in style and form, but each work contains important stories its author needed to tell.