Dua Saleh wins Rising Star in Music at GAY TIMES Honours 2023
Dua Saleh is the recipient of the GAY TIMES Honour for Rising Star in Music. Saleh has seamlessly made huge strides in both music and acting.
Revolting against the binary, they have fluidly intersected genres and created their own music that crosses over a glitchy alt-pop sound to sultry afrobeats and, more recently, emo genre.
Saleh delighted fans in 2023 with their return to music under new record label 2023, Ghostly International, with single ‘Daylight Falls’.
Their unexpected venture into music at the age of 22 was enriched and influenced by Saleh’s formative years. They were born in Kassala, before the Second Sudanese Civil War, ahead of fleeing to the States as a refugee of war. “In Arabic, a lot of the sentences strung together are naturally prose or poetry,” they told GAY TIMES exclusively in their Honours cover interview. “I think Sudanese people are wordsmiths even if they’re not trying to be, there’s a real charm to the language.” They also recalled how the imam’s prayer calls introduced them to pentatonic scales, which they now draw on when making left-field R&B.
