Commonwealth Short Story Prize

This year’s judging panel

• Photo: Max Kennedy

  Louise Doughty

  Chair

  Louise Doughty is the author of ten novels, the latest of which is A Bird in Winter, published by Faber & Faber UK. Her previous books include the bestseller Apple Tree Yard, which was adapted as a major BBC One TV series starring Emily Watson; Platform Seven, which has been filmed for ITVX and Black Water, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has also written novels about the Roma Holocaust during World War Two, Fires in the Dark, and her own Romany-Traveller ancestry, Stone Cradle. She has been nominated for multiple awards including the Costa Novel Award, the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Sunday Times Short Story Prize and her work has been translated into thirty languages. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Folio Prize Academician, the recipient of two Honorary Doctorates for her contributions to literature and has judged many prizes including the Booker Prize and the Costa Novel Award. She is also a screenwriter and journalist and in 2026 will publish a memoir, On This Spot Fell One Tear of Love.

• Photo: Dirk Skiba

  Fred Khumalo

  Judge, Africa Region

  Fred Khumalo is the author of 19 books, which include novels, short story collections, journalism and works of biography. His famous Dancing the Death Drill has been translated into German, Setswana and isiZulu – with more translations into other local languages in the pipeline He has won numerous honours, including the European Union Literary Award (not to be mistaken confused with the European Literary Prize) and the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences Award. A journalist by training, he writes primarily in English but has also published two books in his mother tongue, Zulu.

  He holds an MA Creative Writing from Wits University, is a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, a Fellow of the Academy of the Arts of the World (Cologne, Germany), a Fellow of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, a Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. He has been a judge on numerous South African writing contests including the European Union Literary Prize and Herman Charles Bosman Prize among others. He has participated in numerous writing residencies and literary festivals both in his native South Africa and beyond the borders of his own country. His first book, Touch My Blood was adapted for the stage by James Ngcobo in 2007.

• Photo: Rajib Dhar

  Rifat Munim

  Judge, Asia Region

  Rifat Munim is an editor, journalist, bilingual writer, and translator based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He was the In-Charge of the books wing of the Daily Star (2012–2014) and the literary editor of Dhaka Tribune (2016–2021). He was a jury member for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2019. His books include Bangladesh: A Literary Journey Through 50 Short Stories (ed.). He was among the editors of Speak Out, a special issue focused on freedom of expression, published in 2022 by the Commonwealth Foundation. His English translations of Bengali poetry and short stories, and his articles on freedom of expression and different aspects of Bengali and South Asian fiction, have appeared in Outlook India, World Literature Today, Scroll, Your Impossible Voice, Asia News Network, Dhaka Tribune, and The Daily Star. His essay on the stories and novels written by Bangladesh’s preeminent writer Akhtaruzzaman Elias has been included in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. 

• Photo: Carina Gartner Lamarche

  Norma Dunning (PhD)

  Judge, Canada and Europe Region

  Norma Dunning is a Padlei Inuk Canadian writer, professor and grandmother. She has published two collections of short stories, two collections of poetry and one work of nonfiction. Her future publications include two children’s books, Aput (2026) and Anaanatsiaq (2028) and her first novel titled Naoyak (2026). Her books have received esteemed literary awards and have translated into French, Greek and Amharic. Norma currently teaches for the Faculty of Indigenous Studies at the First Nations University of Canada.

  Books published: Annie Muktuk and Other Stories (UAP, 2017) – Danuta Gleed Award 2018, Eskimo Pie: a poetics of Inuit identity (Bookland, 2020), Taninna (the unseen ones) (D&M 2021) – Govenor General’s Award 2021, Akia (the other side) (Bookland, 2022) and Kinauvit? (What’s your name?) (D&M, 2022) – shortlist Shaughnessy Cohen Political Pen. Books forthcoming: Aput! (Snow) (Tradewinds, 2026), Anaanatsiaq (Tundra Books, 2028), Nayoak (D&M, 2026). 

• Sharma Taylor

  Judge, Caribbean Region

  Sharma Taylor, a Jamaican writer and lawyer, was awarded the 2023 Institute of Jamaica’s Musgrave Bronze Medal for contribution to Literature. The University of the West Indies (Mona Campus) appointed her its Writer-in-Residence for semester II, 2024. Her work has won the 2020 Wasafiri Queen Mary New Writing Prize, the 2020 Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Award and the 2019 Bocas Lit Fest’s Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers Prize. She has been shortlisted four times for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.  

  She was a judge in the 2022 and 2024 The Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition organized by the Royal Commonwealth Society, the 2023 Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival (BCLF) Short Fiction Story Contest for Writers in the Caribbean and was on the jury for the 2023 Bocas Lit Fest Breakthrough Fellowships.  In 2024, she was published in The Cropper Foundations Caribbean Climate Justice anthology, “Writing For Our Lives” launched in November at the COP29 (the 29th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Azerbaijan).  Her debut novel, “What a Mother’s Love Don’t Teach You” was published in 2022 in the UK and Commonwealth by Virago Press. 

• Photo: Copyright Agency

  Maxine Beneba Clarke

  Judge, Pacific Region

  Maxine Beneba Clarke is the author of over fifteen books for adults and children, including the ABIA and Indie award-winning short fiction collection Foreign Soil, the critically acclaimed best selling memoir The Hate Race, the self-illustrated picture book When We Say Black Lives Matter, which was longlisted for the UK’s Kate Greenaway Medal, and the CBCA Honour Book The Patchwork Bike (illustrated by Van T Rudd), which won the 2019 Boston Globe Horn Prize for Best Picture Book. Her poetry collections include Carrying the World, which won the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, How Decent Folk Behave, and It’s the Sound of the Thing: 100 new poems for young people, which won the 2024 ABIA for Book of the Year for Younger Readers. Maxine is the inaugural Peter Steele Poet in Residence at the University of Melbourne (2023-2025).