Commonwealth Short Story Prize
2017The 2017 prize winner
‘the judges were very impressed by ‘The Sweet Sop’s’ originality, the strength of its characterisation, the control of voice, and its humour and emotional punch. It loses none of its effectiveness on a second or third or fourth re-reading, always the mark of a rich and layered story.’
Kamila Shamsie, Chair of Judges
Regional winners
We are delighted to announce this year’s Commonwealth Short Story Prize regional winners!
- Asia 'Drawing Lessons' Anushka Jasraj (India)
- Pacific 'The Death of Margaret Roe' Nat Newman (Australia)
- Canada & Europe 'The Naming of Moths' Tracy Fells (UK)
- Caribbean 'The Sweet Sop' Ingrid Persaud (Trinidad and Tobago)
- Africa 'Who Is Like God' Akwaeke Emezi (Nigeria)
Chair of the international judging panel, novelist Kamila Shamsie, said of the winners:
‘It speaks to the high quality of the shortlisted stories that the judges’ decisions were rarely straightforward – and it speaks to the high quality of the winners that none of the judges left the conversation unsatisfied by the choices we ended up with. These are engaging and moving stories that honour and understand the potential of the short story form to burrow in on intimate stories and also to give you vast canvases painted with precise strokes. They also reveal the extent to which human concerns cross borders while the ways in which those concerns are played out are always individual and specific.’
Talking about this year’s shortlist, Chair of the judges, novelist Kamila Shamsie, said:
‘The extraordinary ability of the short story to plunge you into places, perspectives and emotions and inhabit them fully in the space of only a few pages is on dazzling display in this shortlist. The judges weren’t looking for particular themes or styles, but rather for stories that live and breathe. That they do so with such an impressive range of subject matter and tone has been a particular pleasure of re-reading the shortlisted stories. The geographic spread of the entries is, of course, in good part responsible for this range – all credit to Commonwealth Writers for structuring this prize so that its shortlists never seem parochial.’
Terminal illness and the recent deaths of close family members fed into the work as did the true story of an assassination engineered by regularly feeding the victim poisoned Belgian chocolates. Death, terminal illness, chocolate – it all melted into ‘The Sweet Sop’.
The Shortlist
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'By Way of a Life Plot' , Kelechi NjokuNigeria
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'Close to Home' , Jinny KohSingapore
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'Cursing Mrs. Murphy' , Roland Watson-GrantJamaica
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'Drawing Lessons' , Anushka JasrajIndia
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'Echolocation' , Sarah JacksonUK
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'Gauloises Blue' , Ruth LaceyAustralia
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'Gypsy in the Moonlight' , Caroline GillCanada
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'Harbour' , Chloe WilsonAustralia
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'Hot Pot' , Jasmine SealyCanada
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'Immunity' , Damon ChuaSingapore
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'Nagmaal' , Diane AwerbuckSouth Africa
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'Numb' , Myfanwy McDonaldAustralia
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'Shopping' , Jon Lewis-KatzTrinidad and Tobago
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'Swimmer of Yangtze' , Yiming MaCanada
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'The Brief, Insignificant History of Peter Abraham Stanhope' , Mary RokonadravuFiji
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'The Death of Margaret Roe' , Nat NewmanAustralia
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'The Dying Wish' , Caroline MackenzieTrinidad and Tobago
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'The Naming of Moths' , Tracy FellsUK
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'The Sweet Sop' , Ingrid PersaudTrinidad and Tobago
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'Who Is Like God' , Akwaeke EmeziNigeria
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'An Enquiry into Morality' , Tom VowlerUK
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By Way of a Life PlotKelechi NjokuNigeria
‘Hyacinth Ike planned to die on a Friday, because it seemed apt that he complete his life on a day other human beings tidied up their office desks for the week and—resolute in the conclusion that whatever wasn’t attended to that week would have to wait until the following week—headed for nightclubs, Bachelor’s Eve parties, and preparations for quick weekend trips. But, as the Devil’s interference worked with these things, Hyacinth’s plan had a crease.’
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Close to HomeJinny KohSingapore
‘The year my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, my father sent me to live with my neighbour Aunty Loh. He said he couldn’t drive his taxi, ferry my mother to the hospital, and take care of me. It was only temporary, until my mother finished her round of chemotherapy, until things “settled down.” It was 1998. I was ten and didn’t want to live in a stranger’s home, although to be fair, Aunty Loh and her family weren’t strangers.’
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Cursing Mrs. MurphyRoland Watson-GrantJamaica
‘Halfway across Flat Bridge, Rowena Murphy made a hard right and ran her pickup truck over into the river. Yes, we were with her in that truck and no, it was not an accident. One minute we were heading for Ocho Rios singing along with the radio and the next I was grabbing at water plants and wishing for solid ground. I remember her in the white spaghetti-strap dress disappearing downstream and whatever she was shouting had all come out in bubbles.’
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Drawing LessonsAnushka JasrajIndia
My husband has a mole on his left eyelid that looks like smudged kajal. Moles signify different things depending on the body part. I have one above my bellybutton, and I’m told it’s a sign of fertility, but this has proven untrue. A mole on or around the eyes could mean domestic trouble or bad luck with finances, Mr. Nayar the astrologer informs me. He wants a photograph of my husband’s mole, since my husband works all day, and could not accompany me for this consultation.
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EcholocationSarah JacksonUK
‘Standing in the shade of a lime tree on a hot dusty afternoon, the boy waited for the bell to toll. He heard the bailiff cough and shuffle his papers through the open window across the market square, before St Étienne’s rang, sending out waves like the ripples from a dead-weight dropped in the middle of the quarry lake. After the sixth chime, Victor gave a small nod and then kicked a pebble into the gutter. It rattled through the grille and toppled down the drain and he would surely have heard it clatter when it hit the bottom (it hadn’t rained for weeks) but there was another sound.’
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Gauloises BlueRuth LaceyAustralia
‘Even now, Zoë can remember all the prices in the Melbourne milk bar that her parents owned. Paddle Pops were seven cents. Sunny Boys were three. Violet Crumbles and Smith’s Crinkle Cut chips both sold for five, the same price as the bus fare to her high school. In those days, two dollars a week could get you anything you wanted.
But Zoë didn’t want those things. She didn’t want suede patchwork hot pants like the other girls or white knee-high vinyl boots and boob tubes. At a very early age, she understood the words Pierre Cardin and Yves Saint-Laurent, and she only wanted things they made.’
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Gypsy in the MoonlightCaroline GillCanada
I wish I had amnesia so I could forget Sally Burry. We were at school together, Sally and I, in the coastal hamlet where we were born, Heart’s Pen, on the Caribbean island of Perseverance. The descendants of African slaves predominantly populated Perseverance, but being from Heart’s Pen, Sally and I were Poor White. My people, our people, were Cromwell’s hangover, the inbred aftermath of a centuries’ forgotten British penal colony.
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HarbourChloe WilsonAustralia
‘‘Listen to this, Nina,’ said Tilly. ‘The common death adder. Acanthophis antarcticus. Has the longest fangs of any snake in the country. Highly venomous, producing a neurotoxin which can paralyse and kill a human in six hours.’
‘Stop it, Tilly.’
She had bought a book called ‘What Snake Am I?’ and had been reading out excerpts for the entire journey. We needed books where we were going; no devices were allowed. The book showed, in loving glossy detail, the snakes which we might encounter: Taipan, Black Headed Python, King Brown.’
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Hot PotJasmine SealyCanada
‘Yesterday, before them find the body, I sat at the kitchen table and eat bakes and listen to the morning call-in program with Mummy. You ain’t come home and Mummy was real vex. This was before police come knocking and before men from The Nation and The Advocate come with big camera to take picture of Mummy crying on our veranda in her nightie, hair in rollers still. Before all of that, Mummy was smashing pots and pans around the kitchen, frying flying fish and cussin’ stink. Because the Devil take she first born child. And she should have known the day you were born with them light eyes and that clear skin that you was going to be force-ripe.’
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ImmunityDamon ChuaSingapore
‘We once stood side by side, on top of a cliff.
We would never have met but for the recruit known to everyone as Measles Boy. The location was Tekong, that swampy mosquito-infested isle off the Singapore mainland, and we were undergoing our three-month Basic Military Training.
Measles Boy, according to reports that would come to light later, contracted the disease prior to enlistment. But he showed signs only on arrival at the camp. It was too late. Other recruits had been exposed during the critical incubation period.’
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NagmaalDiane AwerbuckSouth Africa
Klaas stood at the wire gate, folding his hat into a sweaty concertina in the dying heat. The jasmine festered over the fence, and the chainlink ticked: his aging heart kept time in skips and starts. Even after all these years the Master made him dry-mouthed, at a loss for words though they had grown up in the same language, knew one another by their smells and pores and whorls of hair.
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NumbMyfanwy McDonaldAustralia
‘I ride down to the shops on my father’s bicycle. A white Peugeot racer with rusty gears. He can’t balance on a bicycle anymore. He can barely balance on his own two feet.
At the counter, a woman wearing large, thick-lensed glasses flicks through a pile of envelopes packed tightly in a box. “Yes?” she says, without looking up.
“I need a passport photo,” I say.
“Well you’ll have to wait,” she sighs, nodding at a chair in the corner. I look at myself in the mirror behind her. That face is not mine.’ -
ShoppingJon Lewis-KatzTrinidad and Tobago
‘I am sitting outside the dressing rooms exactly where my mother has left me when, about ten or fifteen minutes after she has kissed me goodbye and dissolved into the Macy’s crowd, the white man who is my father appears. On the couch cushion to my left is what my mother would likely refer to as a whole heap of clothes, little kid shirts and little kid pants that have been discarded by shoppers before me and left in a state of complete and utter confusion. On the cushion to my right is a girl who, I have learned, has reached the fourth grade.’
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Swimmer of YangtzeYiming MaCanada
‘The boy had been born with four healthy limbs but by the end of his first year, he had already lost both his arms. Broad, toned shoulders gave him the triangular physique that so many young men craved, as if his upper body were perfectly-fitted for a Zhongshan tunic suit–although if he were actually to have worn one, his father would have needed to trim both sleeves off so as to draw less attention to his son’s missing limbs beneath blue and black cloth.’
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The Brief, Insignificant History of Peter Abraham StanhopeMary RokonadravuFiji
‘At 11.42 pm on 1 November, 2016, Peter Abraham Stanhope sat at his family’s old mahogany dining table and slit his wrists. He had folded three clean bath towels to place his hands upon so as to not make a mess. He watched the news first; switched on to FijiOne Television crackling against the sudden rain, part of the storm approaching from the east. The islands of Wakaya and Makogai were already cloaked in rain well before nightfall. He showered first, of course. Ate his dinner of fried pork sausages, three sausages to be exact.’
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The Death of Margaret RoeNat NewmanAustralia
Havilah Brown lived on the outskirts of town, blessed with an abundance of land and a paucity of dependents. He came in only irregular, only to get his regular supplies from Evan Owens’ grocery store, and on each occasion he would cross my threshold, maybe once, maybe twice, cross my door with his thick-soled boots and darken my floor with his shadow that stretched across the whole room. A big man always was Havilah Brown.
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The Dying WishCaroline MackenzieTrinidad and Tobago
‘Agripina’s body had been decomposing for nearly a month before she realised anything was the matter with her. When her physician told her those very same words – “Jeeeesus Christ! Is nearly a month now you decomposing, girl!” – as she sat in a polka-dotted robe on his examining table, she simply didn’t know how to respond. Even though she was thirty-nine, and the dark waterfall of her hair was now streaked with silver, she still felt that she was in her prime.’
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The Naming of MothsTracy FellsUK
‘He is my son, I created him.’ Miss Bethan’s words fall softly, like a blessing.
Sofia leans closer to hear the old lady, her long black hair falling against Miss Bethan’s nightdress. A noise scratches from inside the pleated shade of the bedside lamp, where a moth has become trapped. She cups it quickly within her palms, ignoring the heat of the bulb.
‘Let me see,’ Adam calls out. He has been sitting at his mother’s bedside since midday, never once leaving her. His eyes shine. He wants to name the moth. -
The Sweet SopIngrid PersaudTrinidad and Tobago
Terminal illness and the recent deaths of close family members fed into the work as did the true story of an assassination engineered by regularly feeding the victim poisoned Belgian chocolates. Death, terminal illness, chocolate – it all melted into ‘The Sweet Sop’.
If is chocolate you looking for, and I talking real cheap, then you can’t beat Golden MegaMart Variety & Wholesale Ltd in Marabella. Think of a Costco boil down small small but choke up with goods from top to bottom. When me and Moms had that holiday in Miami by her brother we were always in Costco. But until they open a Costco in Trinidad go by Golden MegaMart. They does treat people good. As soon as I reach they know I want at least thirty jars of Nutella chocolate spread. And don’t play like you giving me anything else.
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Who Is Like GodAkwaeke EmeziNigeria
My mother talked about God all the time, as if they were best friends, as if He was borrowing her mouth because maybe He trusted her that much or it was easier than burning bushes or He was just tired of thundering down from the skies and having no one listen to Him. I grew up thinking that He was folded into her body, very gently, like when she folded sifted icing sugar into beaten egg whites, those kinds of loving corners.
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An Enquiry into MoralityTom VowlerUK
‘She termed it ironic, though I suspect that wasn’t correct. How the one thing the human mind could not comprehend was itself. She didn’t mean the brain – that clod of moist beige tissue had apparently given up most of its secrets in the last few decades – but consciousness itself, which quite reasonably, she said, could be nothing more than a conjuring trick. And given our ignorance as to its origin, whether it even possessed a physical entity or not, it was entirely possible everything was sentient: cats, birds, insects.’
This year’s judging panel
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Salma Raza
Kamila Shamsie
ChairKamila Shamsie is the author of six novels, including Burnt Shadows, which has been translated into more than twenty languages and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, and A God in Every Stone which was shortlisted for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. Three of her other novels (In the City by the Sea, Kartography, Broken Verses) have received awards from the Pakistan Academy of Letters. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and one of Granta’s ‘Best of Young British Novelists’, she grew up in Karachi, and now lives in London.
Twitter: @kamilashamsie
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Zukiswa Wanner
JudgeZukiswa Wanner is the 2015 winner of South African Literary Award’s K. Sello Duiker Award for her fourth novel, London Cape Town Joburg. Her third novel, Men of the South, was shortlisted for Commonwealth Best Book (Africa region) and the Herman Charles Bosman Awards. Wanner was one of the three judges of the 2015 Etisalat Prize for Fiction, sits on the board of the pan-African literary initiative Writivism and is on the Advisory Board of the Ake Literary Festival. She has facilitated writing workshops in Ghana, Tanzania, Kenya , Uganda, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Germany. She is a columnist for the continental publication New African, and Saturday Nation in Kenya and has guest-hosted the monthly BBC Africa Book Club with Audrey Brown.
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Mahesh Rao
JudgeMahesh Rao is a novelist and short story writer. His short fiction has been shortlisted for various awards, including the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, The Baffler, Elle and Harper’s Bazaar. His debut novel, The Smoke Is Rising, won the Tata First Book Award for fiction, and was shortlisted for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize and the Crossword Prize. One Point Two Billion, his collection of short stories, was published to critical acclaim in October 2015.
Twitter: @mraozing
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Gabrielle Baker
Jacqueline Baker
JudgeJacqueline Baker is a Canadian novelist and short story writer. She is the author of The Horseman’s Graves and A Hard Witching and Other Stories, which won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the City of Edmonton Book Prize, and the Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Fiction. It was also a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Her most recent novel, The Broken Hours, was shortlisted for the Sunburst Award. Jacqueline is Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at MacEwan University.
Twitter @jakerback
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Jacob Ross
JudgeJacob Ross is a writer and editor from Grenada. His first novel Pynter Bender was published in September 2008 to much critical acclaim. It was shortlisted for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers Regional Prize and chosen as one of the British Authors Club’s top three Best First Novels (2009). His second book, The Bone Readers, a crime thriller, was published earlier this year. He is also the author of the acclaimed short story collections, Song for Simone and A Way to Catch the Dust. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been a judge of the V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize, the Olive Cook, Scott Moncrieff and Tom-Gallon Literary Awards.
Twitter: @rosswriterj
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Vilsoni Hereniko
JudgeVilsoni Hereniko was born and raised on Rotuma in the South Pacific for the first sixteen years of his life. The youngest of eleven children, his father was a great storyteller who fired his imagination every night by recounting the oral tales of his isolated island, about 300 miles north of Fiji. These stories sustained and made him aware at a very early age of the transformative power of story. He is now an award-winning playwright, screenwriter, filmmaker and professor at the University of Hawaii. He has also written children’s books, short stories, poetry, and numerous scholarly articles and several books on Pacific art, film, literature, and culture. A stage and film director as well, he has a M.Ed. from the University of Newcastle-upon Tyne and a Ph.D from the University of the South Pacific.
Frequently asked questions
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The prize is open to all Commonwealth citizens aged 18 and over – please see the full list of Commonwealth countries here.
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The regional winners receive £2,500 and the overall winner receives a total of £5,000. The winning stories are published online by Granta and in a special print collection by Paper + Ink. The shortlisted stories are published in adda, the online literary magazine of the Commonwealth Foundation.
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The story must be between 2,000 and 5,000 words.
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