Announcing the 2025 Human Rights Essay Prize Winner

Portside Review is proud to award first place in the 2025 Human Rights Essay Prize to Sabia Rasool for her essay ‘The Blind Side.’ Rachel Desiree Felix’s essay ‘Daughters of Silence’ has taken the runner up position. Sabia Rasool is a writer, editor, and researcher from Kashmir. Her work explores the intersections of memory, visibility, and state violence, often through personal narrative, oral histories, and cultural critique. She is interested in how people resist erasure through music, language, and everyday joy. Sabia has worked across creative media and is currently focused on curating interdisciplinary narratives from Kashmir. She believes storytelling can be both an archive and an act of refusal. Sabia’s essay, ‘The Blind Side,’ will be published shortly as a featured essay in the next issue of Portside Review.

2025 Winner

Sabia Rasool: ‘The Blind Side’

Runner Up

Rachel Desiree Felix: ‘Daughters of Silence’

Shortlist

Chibueze Darlington Anuonye: ‘Go Tell it to White People’

Ashna Hedge: ‘Six Women – Decolonising Reproductive Healthcare in Australia and Beyond’

Amritha Mohan: ‘Swimming Away from Marriage and Other Arrangements’

Patrick Hannan: ‘The Circumstances in Which They Come’

Alifya Maheswari Putri W: ‘The Future Won’t Be Lonely’

Yoga Prasetyo: ‘Migrations and the Traps of Legality’

Susan Francis: ‘No End in Wandering Mazes’

Clare Brown: ‘No Pride in Humanitarianism’

Scherezade Siobhan: ‘The Invisible Subject’

All shortlisted essays will be published in a new edition of Portside Review coming soon.