The Globe Theatre in London will host the Muslim Book Awards presentation on 22nd November. The following books have been shortlisted in the Published Children’s Book category:

The Friendship Matchmaker by Randa Abdel-Fattah (Omnibus Books, Scholastic)
Far From Home by Na’ima B Robert (Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, Janetta Otter-Barry Books)
Wanting Mor by Rukhsana Khan (Groundwood)
A Beautiful Lie by Irfan Master (Bloomsbury)
Guantanamo Boy by Anna Perera (Puffin)

I would say the judges are going to have their work cut out… The great thing about these awards is that they also welcome submissions from unpublished writers, including children’s stories: you can see the shortlist for that and all the other categories here. Also, running tandem to these Awards, are the Young Muslim Writers Awards, which are announced in June each year – go here for this year’s event.

Rukhsana Khan is going to be coming over to the UK from Canada for the Announcement and she would love to visit a school at the same time. Rukhsana’s school visits range from presentations around her award-winning picture books for primary-aged children to “serious issues like teen suicide, loss and abandonment and child refugees. But even my more serious presentations are laced with humour and are age appropriate.” Her visit will also coincide with the UK’s National Anti-Bullying Week, another subject Rukhsana has touched on in her YA novel Dahling, If You Luv Me, Would You Please, Please Smile, and discussed in a Guest Post here at PaperTigers. You can find full details, including how to contact Rukhsana to invite her to your school, on her website.

Author Rukhsana Khan has talked in the past, though perhaps not in as much detail, about incidents of bullying and racist abuse towards her and her family, following their immigration to Canada from Pakistan. As Anti-Bullying Week in the UK draws to a close, and in the hope that by bringing such instances into the open they may never be repeated, we welcome Rukhsana’s guest post today.

By Rukhsana Khan:

When we first came to Canada from Pakistan in 1965, not only were we children bullied at school but my father, a tool and die maker, was bullied at work. Some of his fellow workers wouldn’t call him by name, they’d call him ‘black bastard’, and he put up with it because he had a wife and four children to feed. When we first arrived, he was making about $7 an hour. That doesn’t sound like much now but back then it was good money. However, within a year of buying our house in Dundas, Ontario, and my little sister and brother being born, he got laid off. He ended up accepting another job for $2.35 an hour. At the end of the month, after paying the bills, we had about five dollars a week with which to buy food; most of the time we ate dill weed and potatoes because it was cheap and filling.

We were the only Pakistani Muslim family in Dundas. The other kids in my class didn’t know much about brown people. When I was in elementary school the other children would tell me and my sisters that they were white because they were clean and we were brown because we were dirty. They said that if we went home and took a lot of baths we’d get white like them. So we tried it. We took five baths a day for about two weeks. When that didn’t work, we tried baby powder and finally, we stopped drinking chocolate milk for a while.

When I got to middle school things got so much worse. Suddenly it really mattered (more…)