To celebrate 10 years of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize we are inviting previous winners to share something new with us. Here 2019 Prize winner Constantia Soteriou is in conversation with novelist and Prize judge Karen Lord, discussing Constantia’s story and the war in Cyprus, as well as the impact of the pandemic on women, particularly women writers, and other caregivers.
To read Constantia’s prizewinning story, ‘Death Customs’, translated into English by Lina Protopapa, click here.
Please click here for the link to the UN report on the impact of COVID-19 on women.
Constantia Soteriou
Constantia Soteriou is an award-winning author born in Nicosia. Patakis Publishers have published three of her books: Aishe Goes on Vacation, which received the Athens Prize for Literature, Voices made of Soil, which was shortlisted for the Cyprus Literature awards, and Bitter Country, which won the National Book Award of Cyprus and was shortlisted for the European Union prize for Literature. She has written plays for independent stages and for the Cyprus Theatre Organization. In 2019 Constantia won the Commonwealth Short Story prize for her story ‘Death Customs’.
Dr Karen Lord
Barbadian novelist and research consultant Dr Karen Lord is the author of Redemption in Indigo, winner of the 2008 Frank Collymore Literary Award, the 2011 William L. Crawford Award, and the 2011 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature. Her other works include the science fiction duology The Best of All Possible Worlds and The Galaxy Game, and the crime-fantasy novel Unraveling. She edited the anthology New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean, and has co-authored research on development and on youth employment with the University of the West Indies for the UNDP and the Caribbean Development Bank.
