Fred Khumalo, Maxine Beneba Clarke, and Sharma Taylor are on the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2026 jury, announced on Friday, August 29, 2025. Enter your short story here; your deadline is November 1.
The Commonwealth Short Story Prize is awarded for the best piece of unpublished short fiction in English in the regions of Africa, Asia, Canada and Europe, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. Each of these winners is then eligible for the global prize. Some previous winners in the Africa region have been Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi (2014), Lesley Nneka Arimah (2015), Faraaz Mahomed (2016), Akwaeke Emezi (2017), Efua Traoré (2018), Mbozi Haimbe (2019), Innocent Chizaram Ilo (2020), Rémy Ngamije and Roland Watson-Grant (2021), Ntsika Kota (2022), as well as Kwame McPherson and Hana Gammon (2023), Reena and Portia Subran (2024), and Joshua Lubwama and Chanel Sutherland (2025). Global winners include Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi (2014), Kwame McPherson (2023), and Chanel Sutherland (2025).
The 2026 edition of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize is now open, and we will be accepting entries until November 1, 2025. It is open to citizens of all 56 Commonwealth countries aged 18 and over and is free to enter. Established in 2012, the prize is awarded for the best piece of unpublished short fiction (2,000–5,000 words).
On August 29, the award announced a jury for each of the regions, which includes the following three writers of African descent in their areas;
Fred Khumalo, Judge, Africa Region
Fred Khumalo is the author of 19 books, including novels, short story collections, biographical works, and journalistic non-fiction. His novel 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 confused with the European Literary Prize) and the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences Award.
A journalist by training, he primarily writes in English but has also published two books in his mother tongue, Zulu. He holds an MA in 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, and 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. He has participated in numerous writing residencies and literary festivals both in his native South Africa and beyond. His first book, Touch My Blood, was adapted for the stage by James Ngcobo in 2007.
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 bestselling 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).
Sharma Taylor, Judge, Caribbean Region
Sharma Taylor, a Jamaican writer and lawyer, was awarded the 2023 Institute of Jamaica’s Musgrave Bronze Medal for her contribution to Literature. The University of the West Indies (Mona Campus) appointed her as 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 for the 2022 and 2024 The Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition, organised by the Royal Commonwealth Society, and the 2023 Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival (BCLF) Short Fiction Story Contest for Writers in the Caribbean. She was also on the jury for the 2023 Bocas Lit Fest Breakthrough Fellowships. In 2024, she was published in The Cropper Foundation’s Caribbean Climate Justice anthology, Writing For Our Lives, launched in November at COP29 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.
You can enter your short story here.
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