2022 Commonwealth Short Story Prize Judges

Fred D’Aguiar’s sixth novel, Children of Paradise (Granta, 2015), is inspired by the events at Jonestown, Guyana. Carcanet published his eighth poetry collection, Letters to America, in 2020 along with his first nonfiction book in 2021, Year of Plagues: A Memoir of 2020. Born in London of Guyanese parents and brought up in Guyana, he returned to the UK for his secondary and tertiary education. Currently, he teaches in the Department of English at UCLA in the United States.

devoted to supporting African literary craftsmanship. It has published writers such as Yolande Mukagasana, Billy Kahora and many emerging writers from across the continent. Huza Press runs the only prize for fiction in Rwanda and has launched some of the growing number of writers from Rwanda. Louise started her career as a journalist and worked as a regular reporter and contributor for several Newspapers and Magazines. She has also written academically on National Liberation Movements in Africa and women’s political inclusion. Her work was selected for the Winihin-Jemide grant at the University of Oxford.

Jahnavi Barua is an Indian writer based in Bangalore. Next Door (Penguin India, 2008), her debut collection of short stories was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her next, a novel called Rebirth (Penguin India, 2010), was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. The third, Undertow, a novel, was published by Penguin Random House India (Viking Books) in February 2020 and was longlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature 2020 and the BLF Atta Galatta Book Prize 2020. It won the Best Fiction Prize in the Auther Award 2021.  Her short fiction has been widely anthologized and her work is part of several university syllabi. Jahnavi was born in Guwahati and raised between Assam, Meghalaya, Delhi and Manchester.

Stephanos Stephanides is a Cypriot-born poet, essayist, memoirist, translator, ethnographer, documentary filmmaker, and former Professor of Comparative Literature. He left Cyprus as a child in 1957, returning to live there in 1991.  His experience of Caribbean life and culture while teaching at the University of Guyana (1978-85) significantly shaped his life and creative vision, and led to a lifelong engagement with India. He is an honorary Writing Fellow of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program and Emeritus Fellow of the English Association (UK). Representative publications include Translating Kali’s Feast: the Goddess in Indo-Caribbean Ritual and Fiction (2000), Blue Moon in Rajasthan and other poems (2005), and The Wind Under My Lips (2018).   Films include Hail Mother Kali (Guyana, 1988), Kali in the Americas (New York, 2003), and Poets in No Man’s Land (Nicosia, 2012).

Kevin Jared Hosein is an award-winning writer from Trinidad and Tobago. He was named overall winner of the 2018 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for his story, Passage, and was the Caribbean regional winner in 2015. He has published three books: The Repenters (longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award), The Beast of Kukuyo (second-place winner of the 2017 CODE Burt Award for Caribbean Young Adult Literature) and Littletown Secrets. His writings have been published in numerous anthologies and outlets including Lightspeed Magazine, Moko and adda. His next novel is being published by Bloomsbury (UK/Commonwealth) and Ecco (USA/Canada) in 2022.

Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri writer, poet and academic from southwest New South Wales, Australia. Her poetry and short stories have been published in Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women’s Liberation, The Journal for the Association European Studies of Australia, Australian Poetry Journal, Antipodes, Overland and the Australian Book Review. She has published widely in the area of Aboriginal literature, writing otherness and creative non-fiction.  Jeanine was the recipient of the University of Canberra Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Poetry Prize, and she has won the Oodgeroo Noonucal Prize for Poetry twice. She teaches Creative Writing and Aboriginal Literature at the University of Melbourne. In 2020 Jeanine edited Guwayu – for all times – a collection of First Nations Poetry commissioned by Red Room Poetry and published by Magabala Books.