Revisit the 2017 prize

Commonwealth Short Story Prize

2017

The 2017 prize winner

Ingrid Persaud
The Sweet Sop

Ingrid Persaud from Trinidad and Tobago was announced as the overall winner for the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

The award was presented on the evening of 30 June in the Chamber of The Arts House by the writer Ms Catherine Lim in front of an invited audience of writers, diplomats, press and members of the arts and business communities.

Hosted by the Director-General of the Commonwealth Foundation, Vijay Krishnarayan, the evening included readings from the regional winners, poetry and photography from Marc Nair and a reading by Ms Lim, as well as performances by two groups, NUS Dance Synergy and NUS Electronic Music Lab, from the NUS Centre For the Arts.

The 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize Awards were supported by The Arts House and the Holiday Inn Express Singapore Clarke Quay.

‘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!

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.’

  • Asia
    Drawing Lessons
    Anushka Jasraj
    India
    Read their story on Granta (external)

    Anushka Jasraj is a fiction writer from Mumbai, India. She is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Women’s and Gender studies at the University of Texas-Austin, where she is writing a thesis project on Emily Dickinson. She was the Regional Winner for Asia, 2012 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

    Listen to the author talk about their submission
  • Pacific
    The Death of Margaret Roe
    Nat Newman
    Australia
    Read their story on Granta (external)

    Nat Newman is an Australian freelance writer, journalist and lover of beer. She enjoys writing about science, food security and public health. Her short fiction has appeared in several journals, and she has just completed her first full-length manuscript. Nat’s love of travel has seen her call numerous countries home, including China, New Zealand, the UK and, most recently, Croatia. She can often be found writing in a pub.

    Listen to the author talk about their submission
  • Canada & Europe
    The Naming of Moths
    Tracy Fells
    UK
    Read their story on Granta (external)

    Tracy Fells lives close to the South Downs in England. After a career in Clinical Research she now writes full-time, embracing her love of magical realism and folk lore. Her short stories have been widely published and shortlisted for competitions such as Fish, Willesden Herald and the Brighton Prize. Having graduated from Chichester University with an MA in Creative Writing she is seeking publication of her debut novel and short story collection.

    Listen to the author talk about their submission
  • Caribbean
    The Sweet Sop
    Ingrid Persaud
    Trinidad 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’.

    Read their story on Granta (external)

    Ingrid Persaud is a Trinidadian writer and artist who calls Barbados home. She came to writing and fine art having first pursued a successful legal career that included teaching and scholarship at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, in the United States and King’s College London. Her creative work has been widely exhibited and her writing featured in several magazines. Her debut novel, If I Never Went Home (2014) was highly praised.

    Listen to the author talk about their submission
  • Africa
    Who Is Like God
    Akwaeke Emezi
    Nigeria
    Read their story on Granta (external)

    Akwaeke Emezi is an Igbo and Tamil writer and video artist based in liminal spaces. She is a 2017 Global Arts Fund recipient, awarded by the Astraea Foundation for her video art, and her debut novel Freshwater is forthcoming from Grove Atlantic in Winter 2018. For more of her work, please see www.akwaeke.com

    Listen to the author talk about their submission
  • The Shortlist

    • By Way of a Life Plot
      Kelechi Njoku
      Nigeria

      ‘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.’

      Kelechi Njoku is a former radio broadcaster, now an editor and ghost-writer. He was the West Africa Regional Prize winner of the 2014 Writivism Short Story Competition; he was shortlisted in Africa Book Club’s Short Reads (2014) and Naija Stories’ Best Short (2013), and he has also contributed fiction to the Kalahari ReviewNigerians Talk LitMag, Open Road Review, and Aerodrome. He lives in Lagos and Abuja.

    • Close to Home
      Jinny Koh
      Singapore

      ‘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.’

      Jinny Koh is the author of The Gods Will Hear Us Eventually (Ethos Books, forthcoming 2018), and her stories and essays have appeared in Kyoto Journal, Columbia Journal, Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume 2 (Epigram Books), Litro, and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, among others. She received her Master of Professional Writing from the University of Southern California, where she was the Fiction Editor for The Southern California Review.

    • Cursing Mrs. Murphy
      Roland Watson-Grant
      Jamaica

      ‘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.’

      Roland Watson-Grant is a Jamaican advertising Creative Director who was a winner in the Lightship International Literary Prizes in Hull, England, in 2011. A London publisher from the audience thought his short story could become a full-length novel. Sketcher was published by Alma Books in 2013 to critical acclaim and was shortlisted for an Amazon Rising Star Award. The sequel: Skid, followed in 2014. Sketcher has been translated into Spanish and Turkish and reviewed by, or included on reading lists in The TimesGQ and others.

    • Drawing Lessons
      Anushka Jasraj
      India

      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.

      Anushka Jasraj is a fiction writer from Mumbai, India. She is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Women’s and Gender studies at the University of Texas-Austin, where she is writing a thesis project on Emily Dickinson. She was the Regional Winner for Asia, 2012 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

      Listen to the author talk about their submission
    • Echolocation
      Sarah Jackson
      UK

      ‘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.’

      Sarah Jackson is a poet and academic living in Nottingham, UK. Her poetry collection Pelt (Bloodaxe, 2012) won the Seamus Heaney Prize and was the readers’ nomination for the Guardian First Book Award. She is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker and Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University.

    • Gauloises Blue
      Ruth Lacey
      Australia

      ‘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.’

      Ruth Lacey grew up in Sydney, earned her Arts-Law degree from the University of Melbourne, and an MPhil in Creative Writing from Glamorgan University, South Wales. Her stories appear or are forthcoming in Fish Anthology 2017Litro MagazineCarve and Overland, among others. Ruth currently lives in a small kibbutz in northern Israel. She is a volunteer editor with Kiva.org, and is working on a collection of her short fiction.

    • Gypsy in the Moonlight
      Caroline Gill
      Canada

      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.

      Caroline Gill is a British-born aspiring author. The daughter of Vincentian emigrants, she and her family moved to Toronto in the 1970s. A love of words sparked a public relations career. She is currently working on her debut novel. Caroline holds Creative Writing Certificates from the University of Toronto and Humber School for Writers. She received the 2015 Marina Nemet Award and was published in the top three of the 2015 Penguin Random House Canada Student Award for Fiction.

    • Harbour
      Chloe Wilson
      Australia

      ‘‘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.’

      Chloe Wilson is the author of two poetry collections, The Mermaid Problem and Not Fox Nor Axe, which was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. She was joint winner of the 2016 Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize, and has been awarded the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award and the Fish Publishing Flash Fiction Prize. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook

    • Hot Pot
      Jasmine Sealy
      Canada

      ‘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.’

      Jasmine Sealy is a Barbadian-Canadian writer of short fiction. In 2014 she was shortlisted for the CBC Quebec Writing Competition. She has been previously published in Salut King Kong: New English Writing from Quebec (2014) and the Emerge Anthology (2016). She lives in Vancouver and is a graduate of the The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University.

    • Immunity
      Damon Chua
      Singapore

      ‘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.’

      Damon Chua is a writer, playwright and filmmaker. Born and raised in Singapore, he now calls New York home. His short story ‘Mango’ was included in Silverfish Book’s Twenty-Two New Asian Short Stories, published in 2016. ‘Saiful and the Pink Edward VII’ was part of the Singapore Noir anthology, published by Akashic Books. Other stories have been published by Nordland Publishing, Tall Tale Press, and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. Find out more about Damon here.

    • Nagmaal
      Diane Awerbuck
      South 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.

      Diane Awerbuck is a writer, reviewer and teacher, based in Cape Town. Her short stories are collected in Cabin Fever, and her latest highbrow-horror novel is Home Remedies. She is currently co-writing a frontier-fiction series with Alex Latimer, under the pen name Frank Owen. South is out now and North is coming soon: southvsnorth.com. Diane’s poetry and interviews can be found here.

    • Numb
      Myfanwy McDonald
      Australia

      ‘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.’

      Myfanwy McDonald writes fiction. She lives in Melbourne, on the traditional lands of the Wurundjeri people. Her stories have been published in The Big IssueGoing Down Swinging and the Boston-based zine Infinite Scroll. In 2015 she was a resident at the Arteles Creative Center in Finland. She is currently writing a novel about a series of unusual events on a ship travelling to Australia in the mid nineteenth-century.

    • Shopping
      Jon Lewis-Katz
      Trinidad 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.’

      Jon Lewis-Katz lives in the Bronx, New York. His writing has appeared in publications such as FictionNew Walk, and the Trinidad Guardian. He has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, and the Charles Pick Fellowship from the University of East Anglia. He teaches writing at CUNY and is working on a collection of short stories about West Indians and West Indian-Americans in New York City.

    • Swimmer of Yangtze
      Yiming Ma
      Canada

      ‘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.’

      Yiming Ma is a Chinese-Canadian writer at Stanford University. Previously, he lived in London where he helped set up schools for low-income children throughout Africa and Southeast Asia. His writing has appeared in Stanford Social Innovation ReviewHuffington Post and Ricepaper Magazine, and has been shortlisted by literary journals such as Glimmer Train and Geist.  His story ‘Love | Ramen’ was named a Finalist for the 2016 Penguin Random House Canada Student Award for Fiction.

    • The Brief, Insignificant History of Peter Abraham Stanhope
      Mary Rokonadravu
      Fiji

      ‘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.’

      Mary Rokonadravu is based in Suva, Fiji. She has been writing since she was a child and believes in the transformative powers of stories and storytelling at personal, community, and national levels. Mary has run a seven-prison writing programme and edited the Pacific’s first anthology of writing from prisons. She won the 2015 Regional Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She has been published in Granta and has two short stories coming out in an anthology by Penguin Random House in 2017.

    • The Death of Margaret Roe
      Nat Newman
      Australia

      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.

      Nat Newman is an Australian freelance writer, journalist and lover of beer. She enjoys writing about science, food security and public health. Her short fiction has appeared in several journals, and she has just completed her first full-length manuscript. Nat’s love of travel has seen her call numerous countries home, including China, New Zealand, the UK and, most recently, Croatia. She can often be found writing in a pub.

      Listen to the author talk about their submission
    • The Dying Wish
      Caroline Mackenzie
      Trinidad 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.’

      Caroline Mackenzie is a Trinidadian writer whose short stories have been published in literary journals and magazines around the world. A former national scholar, she speaks four languages and holds a Masters in technical translation from Imperial College London. She presently works as a freelance medical and legal translator in Trinidad, where she lives with her husband Stephen and their menagerie of pets.

    • The Naming of Moths
      Tracy Fells
      UK

      ‘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.

      Tracy Fells lives close to the South Downs in England. After a career in Clinical Research she now writes full-time, embracing her love of magical realism and folk lore. Her short stories have been widely published and shortlisted for competitions such as Fish, Willesden Herald and the Brighton Prize. Having graduated from Chichester University with an MA in Creative Writing she is seeking publication of her debut novel and short story collection.

      Listen to the author talk about their submission
    • The Sweet Sop
      Ingrid Persaud
      Trinidad 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.

      Ingrid Persaud is a Trinidadian writer and artist who calls Barbados home. She came to writing and fine art having first pursued a successful legal career that included teaching and scholarship at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, in the United States and King’s College London. Her creative work has been widely exhibited and her writing featured in several magazines. Her debut novel, If I Never Went Home (2014) was highly praised.

      Listen to the author talk about their submission
    • Who Is Like God
      Akwaeke Emezi
      Nigeria

      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.

      Akwaeke Emezi is an Igbo and Tamil writer and video artist based in liminal spaces. She is a 2017 Global Arts Fund recipient, awarded by the Astraea Foundation for her video art, and her debut novel Freshwater is forthcoming from Grove Atlantic in Winter 2018. For more of her work, please see www.akwaeke.com

      Listen to the author talk about their submission
    • An Enquiry into Morality
      Tom Vowler
      UK

      ‘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.’

      Tom Vowler is an award-winning novelist and short story writer living in south west England. His debut story collection, The Method, won the Scott Prize in 2010 and the Edge Hill Readers’ Prize in 2011, while his novel What Lies Within received critical acclaim. He is editor of the literary journal Short Fiction and an associate lecturer in creative writing at Plymouth University. His second novel, That Dark Remembered Day, was published in 2014. Represented by the Ed Victor Literary Agency, Tom’s second collection of stories, Dazzling the Gods, is forthcoming in 2017. Find out more here.

    This year’s judging panel

    • Salma Raza

      Kamila Shamsie

      Chair

      Kamila 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

    • Zukiswa Wanner

      Judge

      Zukiswa 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.

    • Mahesh Rao

      Judge

      Mahesh 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

    • Gabrielle Baker

      Jacqueline Baker

      Judge

      Jacqueline 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

    • Jacob Ross

      Judge

      Jacob 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

    • Vilsoni Hereniko

      Judge

      Vilsoni 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

    1. The prize is open to all Commonwealth citizens aged 18 and over –  please see the full list of Commonwealth countries here.

    2. 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.

    3. The story must be between 2,000 and 5,000 words.