The internationally celebrated Aga Khan Music Awards will be held in London for the first time.
Taking place over a four-day event from the 20th to the 23rd November 2025, at the Southbank Centre across the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall and The Purcell Room, the Awards recognise and celebrate the immense diversity of music in societies across the world in which Muslims have a significant presence. The Aga Khan Music Awards are open to all, and the nominees need not be Muslims themselves.
The awards honour outstanding musicians and artists whose work preserves, revives, and reimagines devotional music and poetry, indigenous classical music, traditional folk music, and tradition-inspired contemporary music that has flourished in cultures shaped by Islam.
This will be the third triannual Aga Khan Music Awards. The inaugural awards took place in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2019, followed by their second edition in Muscat, Oman, in 2022. Past winners include British-Indian multi-instrumentalist Soumik Datta, Oumou Sangaré from Mali, Peni Candra Rini from Indonesia and the late Ustaad Zakir Hussain from India.
Laureates share a prize fund of $500,000 and gain access to professional opportunities such as commissions, recordings, management contracts, and support for educational and preservation initiatives.
The awards recognise individuals, groups, and institutions whose work sustains and reinvents musical traditions. Aligned with the Aga Khan Music Programme’s broader mission, the Awards advance pluralism, tolerance, and global understanding through music at a time when there is much conflict and fragmentation in the world.
The Aga Khan Music Awards 2025 are held under the patronage of His Highness Prince Rahim Aga Khan V, alongside his uncle, Prince Amyn Aga Khan. The new chapter reflects both continuity and remembrance, honouring the legacy of the Awards’ Founder and Chair, His Late Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan IV, whose deep belief in the power of music to connect, uplift, and transcend continues to inspire the Awards’ spirit. The creation of the Music Awards reaffirmed His Late Highness’s belief that music lived beyond its cultural expression, as a force for dignity, hope, shared humanity, and connection across cultures, generations, and geographies.
His Highness Prince Rahim Aga Khan V said: “I am honoured to carry forward a vision deeply rooted in my father’s belief in the power of music to bridge cultures and uplift the human spirit. The Aga Khan Music Awards reflect values that lie at the heart of the Aga Khan Development Network: pluralism, intercultural dialogue, and the spiritual connection that communities around the world find in music. In many of the regions we serve, music is an integral part of daily life, woven into the rhythms of prayer, celebration, memory and identity. We continue to support artists and traditions that speak not only to heritage, but also to hope.”
Prince Amyn Aga Khan said: “The Aga Khan Music Awards continue to fill a unique cultural role, celebrating the full spectrum of music that flourished in the cultures of the Muslim World, while creating new sounds, new music born in part from these traditions and from the discovery of other cultures and traditions. These genres and styles embody music’s traditional role as a source of spiritual enlightenment, inspiration and social cohesion at a time when strengthening tolerance and understanding have become a worldwide priority.”
The Aga Khan Music Awards 2025 will be held and produced in partnership with the EFG London Jazz Festival. “We are delighted to be able to open the EFG London Jazz Festival’s stages to artists from the Aga Khan Music Awards,” said EFG London Jazz Festival Director Pelin Opcin. “Not only do we share the Awards’ values of dialogue, collaboration and connection, but we also celebrate the deep freedoms and expressivity that are reflected across these very varied and distinctive musical styles.”
Fairouz Nishanova, Director of the Aga Khan Music Programme, said: “The Aga Khan Music Awards have grown into a community – indeed, a family – built over the past 25 years, and comprising artists, educators, students, and communities bound by a shared devotion to preserving and developing musical heritage. As we begin this new chapter, our commitment remains to honouring the traditions that shape us and to ensuring that music remains a living, vital force within the communities we serve.”
Fairouz Nishanova added: “It is with great pride and anticipation that we look forward to welcoming the Aga Khan Music Awards to London. It has long been one of the world’s great cultural capitals, a city where traditions from across the globe meet and evolve together. London has also been a vital home for the music from the Great East, welcoming communities from Asia, the Middle East and Africa who have carried their respective heritages into new forms. In this city, diasporic expression has not only preserved tradition, but also transformed it, thereby creating new sounds rooted in memory, movement and belonging.”
Nominations for AKMA 2025 opened in April 2024 and solicited from a distinguished international group of performing artists and music specialists who include educators, scholars, producers, arts presenters, and representatives of civil society and cultural development organisations.
The winners are chosen by an independent Master Jury appointed by the Awards co-chairs. The jurors are drawn from eminent performers, composers, festival directors, music scholars, and arts education leaders. The number of awardees and the specific domains of activity in which awards are made are determined by the Master Jury for each Awards cycle. No one directly associated with the Aga Khan’s institutions is eligible for consideration.
For more information, interview requests, as well as media interest in attending media briefings, awards and festival events, please contact:
- Leticia Callista | Account Executive | leticia@curzonpr.com
- Simon Hemelryk | Account Director | simon@curzonpr.com
A selection of hi-res images, headshots of spokespeople and B-roll, please see here.
NOTES TO EDITORS
Event details
Aga Khan Music Awards 2025
20-23 November 2025
Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room, The Southbank Centre, London
Aga Khan Music Programme (AKMP)
The Aga Khan Music Awards are an initiative of the Aga Khan Music Programme. Founded in 2000, the Aga Khan Music Programme (AKMP) supports, validates and celebrates the pivotal role of music and musicians in communities where it works and for communities it serves. It collaborates with musicians, ensembles and educators throughout Central and South Asia, the Middle East, North and West Africa. For AKMP, music is an elemental expression of human spirituality, and a crucial means of fostering tolerance, curiosity and pluralism by connecting individuals and communities, and bringing musicians’ work to a global audience. While respecting and supporting communities’ often ancient traditions, the AKMP encourages new projects from contemporary artists immersed in those rich heritages, producing music inspired by but not constrained by tradition.
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EFG London Jazz Festival
Now in its 33rd year, the EFG London Jazz Festival will take place from 14–23 November 2025. Over ten days and nights, musicians from across the globe will gather in London for an international celebration of music, presenting boundary-pushing performances that illuminate jazz and its influence across genres and cultures. Jazz transcends borders, weaving together diverse musical traditions and uniting communities through the universal language of music.
Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN)
The Aga Khan Development Network is a group of private, non-denominational development agencies working to improve living conditions and opportunities for people in some of the poorest parts of the developing world. Its multifaceted approach includes health, education, culture, rural development, institution-building, and economic development initiatives, aiming to improve the quality of life of the people and communities it serves, and to assist individuals to become self-reliant.
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His Highness Prince Rahim the Aga Khan V
Following the passing of His Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan, Prince Rahim Al-Hussaini is the 50th hereditary Imam of the Shia Ismaili Muslims and Chair of the Aga Khan Development Network. For more information, please see: here.
Prince Amyn Aga Khan
Prince Amyn is the uncle of His Highness the Aga Khan. He has been active in the leadership of the Aga Khan Development Network for over 50 years and serves as the Co-Chair of the Aga Khan Music Programme. Prince Amyn has always held a deep interest in music, studying piano and then voice, at the New England Conservatory during his time at Harvard, and serving as a juror for various musical awards such as the Premio Venezia, the Vendôme Prize and the Concours de Genève.
His Late Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan IV
His Highness Prince Karim al-Hussaini Aga Khan was the 49th hereditary Imam of the Shia Ismaili Muslims and Founder and Chair of the AKDN. Since 1957, His Highness dedicated his efforts to the spiritual and material well-being of 15 million Ismailis and the communities in which they live, across more than 25 countries across Central Asia, the Middle East, South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Australasia, the Far East, Europe and North America. He was committed to improving the quality of life of vulnerable populations and was recognised globally as a statesman and humanitarian. For more information, please see: here.
