+972 Writer Mya Guarnieri Jaradat’s book short-listed for the Wingate Prize

By +972 Magazine January 12, 2018 | Edit

Guarnieri Jaradat’s book, The Unchosen, is deeply reported look into the lives of asylum seekers and migrant workers in Israel.

+972 writer Mya Guarnieri Jaradat. (Hannah Mayo)
+972 writer Mya Guarnieri Jaradat. (Hannah Mayo)

+972 Magazine congratulates writer Mya Guarnieri Jaradat on her book, The Unchosen: The Lives of Israel’s New Others, being short-listed for the 2018 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize. The Unchosen was short-listed alongside The Dark Circle by Linda Grant, The Mighty Frank by Michael Frank, Small Pieces: A Book of Lamentations by Joanne Limburg, Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem by George Prochnik, and The Holocaust by Laurence Rees.

According to the Wingate Foundation, the award is given to books that explore the “depth and diversity” of Jewish writing globally. The 2018 prize winner will be announced on February 15.

The Unchosen is deeply reported look into the lives of asylum seekers and migrant workers in Israel. It was published by Pluto Press in March 2017. In her review of The Unchosen for +972, Natasha Roth writes:

The book chronicles, through a blend of assiduous reporting and frank anecdotes, the country’s war on non-Jewish migrants, be they asylum seekers or foreign workers. Jaradat, who is also a blogger for +972, leads us around Israel and takes us in and out of the homes of her subjects, most of whom have congregated in south Tel Aviv — an area with which the author is clearly intimately familiar. Through their experiences, and Jaradat’s personal reflections, we learn about the toll that Israel’s crusade against undocumented workers and asylum seekers takes on its victims.

Read the rest of Natasha Roth’s review of The Unchosen here.

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