Kwame McPherson, Hana Gammon were named winners in their regions by the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2023 on Wednesday, May 17, 2023.
The Commonwealth Short Story Prize is awarded for the best piece of unpublished short fiction in English in the regions of Africa, Asia, Canada and Europe, the Caribbean, and the Pacific.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. Previous winners in the Africa region have been Jekwu Anyaegbuna (2012), Julian Jackson (2013), 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), and Ntsika Kota (2022). Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi won the global prize in 2014.
The judging panel for the 2023 edition of the prize is chaired by Pakistani writer and translator Bilal Tanweer. His fellow judges, drawn from the five regions of the Commonwealth, are Rwandan-born Namibian writer, photographer, and editor, Rémy Ngamije (Africa), Sri Lankan author and publisher Ameena Hussein (Asia), Canadian writer and critic Madeleine Thien (Canada/Europe), poet and New Zealand’s former Poet Laureate, Dr. Selina Tusitala Marsh (Pacific), and poet and novelist Mac Donald Dixon from Saint Lucia (Caribbean).
The stories on the 2023 shortlist announced selected from a total of 6,642 entries from 56 Commonwealth were revealed on March 4 before the jury selected the winners on Wednesday. Chair of the Judges Bilal Tanweer said of the judging process: ‘It was both an agony and a pleasure to choose the overall winner from each region. All the winning stories demonstrated impressive ambition, an intimate understanding of place and a real mastery of the craft. The judges were unanimous in their admiration of these stories and how they sought to tackle difficult metaphysical and historical questions.’
The two winners of African descent are;
Africa
- The Undertaker’s Apprentice, Hana Gammon (South Africa)
‘The Undertaker’s Apprentice’ follows a group of children in a small town, relaying their interactions with the town’s sombre but kind mortician. As the children grow up, they are forced to question issues of growth, decay, and exchange between different states of being. Hana Gammon was born in Cape Town, South Africa, and has had a love for writing ever since she could first pick up a pen. She is currently studying for a BA in Language and Culture at the University of Stellenbosch.
Caribbean
- Ocoee, Kwame McPherson (Jamaica) ‘
The story is an interweaving of African American reality and history, and Caribbean folklore. Kwame McPherson is a 2007 Poetic Soul winner and was the first Jamaican Flash Fiction Bursary Awardee for The Bridport Prize: International Creative Writing Competition in 2020. Kwame is a recent and successful contributor to Flame Tree Publishing’s (UK) diverse-writing anthologies and a contributor to ‘The Heart of a Black Man’ anthology to be published in Los Angeles, which tells personal, inspiring, uplifting, and empowering stories from influential and powerful Black men.
The five regional winners’ stories will be published online by the literary magazine Granta, ahead of the announcement of the overall winner at a ceremony on June 27, 2023.
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