Aaliyah Bilal, author of "Temple Folk," is the winner of the 2023 Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence.
For Aaliyah Bilal, author of the short story collection Temple Folk, fiction writing was not always the goal. Bilal is this year’s winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, an award presented each year by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation to a debut novel by a rising African American writer. The stories in Temple Folk, which was also a 2023 National Book Award finalist, follow the lives of Black Muslims in the United States.
Though the book is inspired by her own experience growing up in a Sunni Muslim family, Bilal has researched Muslim minorities around the world for years, studying in London and in Southern China on a research fellowship. On the heels of a big academic push, she had a moment of clarity other writers dream about.
“I had finished this master's degree at the University of London, and I submitted my dissertation, which was about the Maulid in East Africa, and specifically in Zanzibar and how they interact with Sufi systems,” she said. “I just was walking across the Thames feeling like I'm a square peg trying to fit myself into a circular hole. And it was in that moment that I had this epiphany, and a story. An entire story came to me while I was standing on the Thames. It was like a revelation from God. Like, ‘Girl, you've been trying to be this academic person, but I made you a fiction writer.’”
She wrote her first story in one sitting, and though she said it’s never going to see the light of day, it lit the fire to understand how to write fiction. Bilal spent the next ten years honing her craft by studying the books she loved, like Tony Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and the works of Edward P. Jones—“When I met him on the page, it was like love at first sight,” she said—studying how the books “seduced” the reader. “I read Maud Martha maybe forty times in those years,” she said.
About three years into her writer’s journey, she wrote “Woman in Niqab,” a story that would eventually appear in Temple Folk. The story follows a woman whose suspicions that her father is cheating prompts her to wear her hair in public. Bilal knew that this was the start of something.
Now, years later, to have her book finally out in the world, she said, “ it just feels so lovely. And I'm exceedingly grateful to the Baton Rouge Area Foundation and to the Ernest Gaines prize for acknowledging this book.”
Bilal’s advice to aspiring writers is to not get discouraged by the gatekeepers of creative writing, and to put the work first.
“It is within all of our capacities to do excellent work and there isn't anything of a technical nature that I or really anybody can tell you that the books cannot explain themselves,” she said. “I just want to encourage everybody that's interested to pursue a writing life, especially in this day and age where we are losing empathy for each other and losing our perspective on the experience of the other.”
Aaliyah Bilal will be honored with a $15,000 prize to further her literary pursuits during a special ceremony at 6 pm on October 23, 2024, at the Manship Theatre in the Shaw Center for the Arts, Baton Rouge. Learn more about Bilal and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence at ernestjgainesaward.org.
