Kwame McPherson was named the winner of the global Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2023 today, June 27, 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The Commonwealth Short Story Prize is awarded for the best piece of unpublished short fiction in English in the regions of Africa, Asia, Canada and Europe, the Caribbean, and the Pacific.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 was 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 2023 shortlists, selected from a total of 6,642 entries from 56 Commonwealth nations, were revealed on March 4 before the jury selected the regional winners on May 17. Kwame McPherson (Jamaica) was declared the winner for his short story Ocoee which interweaves African American reality and history, and Caribbean folklore.
Chair of the judges, Pakistani writer and translator Bilal Tanweer said, “Ocoee forces a reckoning with the challenge that confronts all writers in the postcolonial world: how to write about a world that has been destroyed without any traces. Kwame McPherson takes on the extraordinarily difficult challenge of writing about a past that has left no evidence of its existence. ‘Ocoee’’s accomplishment is how it achieves this thorny task with simplicity, humility, and real heart. It is a story that resonates deeply and leaves us with a glimpse of all the ghosts that continue to haunt the present, and, in the process, performs one of the most essential tasks of writing: to bear witness to our condition, and to remind us, again, what it means to be human.”
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.
McPherson, who lives in Kingston, Jamaica said, ‘When I began my writing journey, it was not a conscious decision, it was just something I enjoyed doing. Creating and imagining worlds, sharing occurrences and experiences that brought no end of joy in seeing a reader engage and find pleasure in what I have produced. Having the ability to provoke thought, interest or move a reader from one mental and emotional state to the next, is a skill within itself and one I have been blessedly bestowed with and do not take for granted. The culmination of that ability is where I am today, winning a prestigious award, not only for the Caribbean but for the entire Commonwealth. That is no mean feat. I am humbled since I stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before, especially those scribes, griots and storytellers of our story, fulfilling a purpose I now live, walk and breathe. I am extremely proud I have represented my many friends, family and, importantly, my country Jamaica, in the way that I have.’
He wins the £5,000 cash prize. You can read the prize-winning story ‘Ocoee’ on Granta by clicking here.
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