The Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival: Short Fiction Story Contest

2024 Contest Brief

Each year it feels like the world is confronted by a new challenge, tilting on its axis towards one trouble or another. Seasons shift, people fade, the rhythm of the tide of our lives ebbs and flows. Rumours of shrinking coastlines, whispers of rising sea levels grapple for our attention with as much fervour as beribboned children to the limbs of their parents and guardians. Our hands fan the dying embers under coal pots, or grip, white-knuckled, the steering wheels of foreign-used cars as it snakes slowly in lines of traffic jam that seem in direct odds with island lives. Across the oceans, we sow the seeds of our history into foreign soil while we ruminate over the questions the privilege of distance affords. Our hands feverishly attempt to wave life and meaning into the ordinary – into the mundane.

[continue reading here]