The Commonwealth Foundation has announced five regional winners of the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, the world’s most global literary prize. This year’s prize attracted the highest-ever number of entrants with 7,359, and the winners — 35-year-old Portia Subran from Trinidad and Tobago, 53-year-old Julie Bouchard from Canada, 47-year-old Pip Robertson from New Zealand, 39-year-old Reena Usha Rungoo from Mauritius, and 26-year-old Sanjana Thakur from India — were all nominated for the first time. They will go through to the final round of judging and the overall winner will be announced on 26 June 2024.

Regional winners will receive 2,500 pounds and the overall winner 5,000 pounds.

This year’s stories address a wide range of themes — including love and loss, complex relationships with parents, and the joy of simple pleasures. Francophone writer Julie Bouchard’s story What Burns (Ce Qui Brûle) describes the devastating consequences of a catastrophic wildfire in Canada. Pip Robertson’s A River, Then the Road is the story of a 12-year-old girl who has been abducted by her troubled father. Portia Subran’s The Devil’s Son, told in Trinidadian dialect, tells of a retired oil field worker, recollecting a dark incident that happened 60 years before. Reena Usha Rungoo’s Dite draws upon a Mauritian woman’s love of tea to explore memories of past relationships — and the colonial history of her favourite drink. Taking its name from the Bollywood actress, Sanjana Thakur’s Aishwarya Rai is an adoption story in reverse, as a young woman seeks out a possible mother from a shelter.

Subran is a writer and ink artist, from Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago. Her stories are inspired by her parents’ tales of colonial and early postcolonial Trinidad, her experience, and Ole Talk gathered over the years. She is the winner of the 2019 Cecile de Jongh Literary Prize from the Caribbean Writer, and the 2016 Small Axe Literary Short Story Competition. She was a finalist for the 2022 BCLF Short Fiction Story Contest.

She studied at The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, and cites Trinidadian novelist Merle Hodge as an inspiration to become a writer.

The Caribbean regional winner said, “I have a compendium of ancestral information fermenting inside my head, and I have no choice but to weave them and create something that will last for future Trinbagonian generations to one day reflect on. The men and women in my family are heroes and inspire me.

“My maternal grandmother escaped an arranged child-marriage by jumping out the window on her wedding night and running back to her mother’s house. After watching their mother starve to death, my maternal grandfather and grand-uncle, children of an illegitimate Hindu marriage, fought off an abusive relative and started a whole new life on their own. Caribbean experiences are laced with anger, laughter, pleasure, sadness and secrets. My story, The Devil’s Son is no different. The setting is based on the pre-independent memories of my parents, but the plot grew out of my own thoughts on superstition, grief and the lies we tell ourselves (and others), to ensure our survival.”

The judge for the Caribbean region, poet and author Richard Georges from the British Virgin Islands, noted, “Portia Subran’s The Devil’s Son is immense, gripping — a wonder. The writer holds an earnest reverence for the musicality of language, and the magic that courses through the Caribbean landscape, and utilises both to create a tale that harnesses horror, myth, and the colonial utility of religion to explore a deeply personal family trauma. The story poses questions of history and memory, objective and subjective truth, and metaphorises the advent of electricity in central Trinidad as a fledgling epistemology challenging the religious hegemony. This is a memorable story that balances darkness with bright humour, a testament to the writer’s remarkable voice and brilliant technique.’

Congratulating the regional winners, Chair of the Judges Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi said, “The short story form has neither the luxury of time nor the comfort of space. It is an impatient form; it does not dance around. The punch of a good short story leaves you breathless. As the judging panel, we enjoyed, sorrowed, celebrated and eventually agreed that these stories came up on top of the different regions.”

The Commonwealth Short Story Prize is awarded annually for the best piece of unpublished short fiction from any of the Commonwealth’s 56 member states. It is the most accessible and international of all writing competitions: in addition to English, entries can be submitted in Bengali, Chinese, Creole, French, Greek, Malay, Maltese, Portuguese, Samoan, Swahili, Tamil, and Turkish. Such linguistic diversity in a short story prize in part reflects the richness of the Commonwealth, not least its many and varied literary traditions. This year, 414 entries were submitted in languages other than English.

The regional winning stories by region are:

Africa: Dite by Reena Usha Rungoo (Mauritius)

Asia: Aishwarya Rai by Sanjana Thakur (India)

Canada and Europe: What Burns by Julie Bouchard (Canada) (translated by Arielle Aaronson from the French, Ce Qui Brûle)

Caribbean: The Devil’s Son by Portia Subran (Trinidad and Tobago)

Pacific: A River Then the Road by Pip Robertson (New Zealand)