Winners of the 2016 Emerging Voices awards announced

The Indonesian writer Eka Kurniawan won the $40,000 prize for best novel at the second FT/OppenheimerFunds Emerging Voices awards in New York on Monday. Kurniawan won the award for his novel Man Tiger.

The art and film awards, also worth $40,000 each, went to the Zimbabwean artist Gareth Nyandoro and the Brazilian film-maker Clarissa Campolina.

The awards attracted nearly 800 entries, with the winners selected by judging panels that included Elif Shafak, the Turkish writer and commentator, Iwona Blazwick, director of London’s Whitechapel Gallery, and Mira Nair, the Indian director of Salaam Mumbai! and, most recently, Queen of Katwe.

Emerging Voices

The Winners

Gareth Nyandoro, winner, Emerging Voices 2016 Art Award
Artist’s vivid, abstract depictions of commercial life in Harare have earned him international recognition

Eka Kurniawan, winner, Emerging Voices 2016 Fiction Award
‘Writers have to challenge every kind of morality or virtue’, says the Indonesian writer

Clarissa Campolina, winner, Emerging Voices 2016 Film Award
‘I wanted to tell a fable where God is feminine,’ says the Brazilian director

Lionel Barber, Financial Times editor, said: “The Emerging Voices awards reflect both the FT’s deep interest in the newly emerging economies and our longstanding commitment to encouraging and reporting on the arts. With these awards, we aim to recognise outstanding talent in these countries, but also to bring their work to the attention of our readers and a wider public.”

Kurniawan’s novel, the story of a young man possessed by the spirit of a supernatural female white tiger, won international acclaim when it was published in an English translation by Labodalih Sembiring. The FT review said of Kurniawan’s work: “It’s easy to see why he is being compared to Gabriel García Márquez and hailed as one of the leading lights of contemporary Indonesian fiction.”

Nyandoro has said he finds inspiration for his paper-on-canvas works from Harare’s local markets.

Campolina won the film award for her enigmatic work Solon, which she described as “the encounter of a mysterious creature with a devastated landscape” inspired by her upbringing in the hills of the mining region of Minas Gerais in Brazil.