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The Commonwealth Short Story Prize
The Short Story Prize was launched by Commonwealth Writers in 2012 as an award for the best piece of unpublished short fiction written in English from across the Commonwealth. It is one of the few international prizes open to published and unpublished writers alike and to stories translated into English.
Commonwealth Writers is the cultural initiative of the Commonwealth Foundation, an international development organization based in London. It was set up to inspire and connect writers and storytellers across the world. We believe that well-told stories can help people make sense of events, engage with others, and take action to bring about change.
This anthology comprises some of the strongest entries to the prize between 2012 and 2014, selected by the Chairs of the judging panels: author Bernardine Evaristo, broadcaster and journalist Razia Iqbal, and editor and critic Ellah Wakatama Allfrey.
Each year the international judges select five winning writers from five different Commonwealth regions — Africa, Asia, Canada and Europe, the Caribbean, and the Pacific — one of whom is chosen as the overall winner.
We receive thousands of stories from almost every one of the fifty-three countries in the Commonwealth. As well as more established writers, the shortlists each year include many new and emerging writers, often from countries with little or no publishing infrastructure.
It’s our aim to bring writers from around the world to the attention of a wider audience. Let’s Tell This Story Properly is one way to achieve this.
We would like to thank our judges from 2012–14: Tash Aw, Doreen Baingana, Urvashi Butalia, Craig Cliff, Elise Dillsworth, Marlon James, Billy Kahora, Oonya Kempadoo, Cresantia Frances Koya, Michelle de Kretser, Nicholas Laughlin, Lisa Moore, Courttia Newland, Jeet Thayil, and D.W. Wilson. We also wish to thank Kirk Howard and Beth Bruder from Dundurn Press, the seventeen authors featured in the anthology, and the thousands of writers who enter the Prize each year.
Lucy Hannah, Programme Manager
Commonwealth Writers
Foreword
Sometimes you can wait for months, even years, for a story to turn up. You wait, sheltering by the side of a library, or at a bus stop where once you had taken a magical ride that changed your life, and peer into the failing light, desperately looking, hoping one will turn up before the light goes completely and it is too dark to see. You begin to wonder whether you just missed the last one. Maybe you no longer know what a story looks like and it has passed by without you recognizing it. You try to remember what a story is, what it was, what it meant. You panic because you can’t be sure what moved you most. What was that thing that lit up your life? Made you think it was all worthwhile. Just to read it was to make the day worthwhile. You look at a story you started to write and think, no, that can’t be it. Then, even that disappears like the invisible lemony ink of your childhood. You wonder why the clouds are moving across the sky. Or are they? You begin to wonder, does anyone write stories anymore? Are there any stories left in this world that is so gridlocked with the debris of instant gratification. You wonder whether you will ever see another story like the one you can’t remember that set you on this road on which you are now stranded.
And then something turns a corner and you see a story coming. Then another, and another, and another. You see a whole anthology bringing you a whole new world in one amazing parade. The relief is indescribable. The best thing you can do is to turn the page and read. Then, you will remember everything: why you write, why you read, why you are who you are.
Romesh Gunesekera
Romesh Gunesekera was born in Sri Lanka and moved to Britain in the early 1970s. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is the author of eight books of fiction. His novel Reef was shortlisted for the 1994 Man Booker Prize. His new collection of stories set in postwar Sri Lanka, Noontide Toll, was published by Granta in 2014 along with a twentieth-anniversary edition of Reef. Romesh is the Chair of the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
Editor’s Note
Late this summer, the team at Commonwealth Writers gathered together the last three Chairs of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize judging panels: me, Bernardine Evaristo, and Razia Iqbal. We had the daunting — and hugely pleasurable — task of choosing our favourite stories to publish in this anthology. During our deliberations, we looked for writing that evoked a strong sense of place. After all, the adventure of reading away from one’s own immediate environment is the promise of instant travel, the possibility of immersion in another reality. We also looked for writing that was ambitious, stories that offered surprise, stories that made us think, and stories whose characters stayed in our minds long after the pages were turned.
The result is an eclectic mix of genres and settings — both in time and place. The voices you will find here are as varied and individual as the countries from which the authors are writing. Each story brings us news from another land: there’s the hunt for a giant squid in New Zealand; a chronicle of hard times in Singapore; a baby shower and a lost boy in the Bahamas; an English woman and her spectral lover in China; and adventures in taxidermy in South Africa. Each story is written in English, but the language is inflected with the cadences of locality and a host of native tongues: Ganda, Chinese, patois, Afrikaans. Several of the writers appearing here already have a significant body of work to their credit. A couple appear with the first stories they have ever written. In casting its net across the globe — bringing stories from around the world to readers around the world — the Commonwealth Short Story Prize is unique in allowing such a range of writers to appear together in one volume.
Ellah Wakatama Allfrey
London, November 2014
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
Let’s Tell This Story Properly
If you go inside Nnam’s house right now the smell of paint will choke you, but she enjoys it. She enjoys it the way her mother loved the smell of the outside toilet, a pit latrine, when she was pregnant. Her mother would sit a little distance away from the toilet, whiff-ward, doing her chores, eating and disgusting everyone until the baby was born. But Nnam is not pregnant. She enjoys the smell of paint because though her husband Kayita died a year ago, his scent lingered, his image stayed on objects and his voice was absorbed in the bedroom walls: every time Nnam lay down to sleep, the walls played back his voice like a disc. This past week, the paint has drowned Kayita’s odour and the bedroom walls have been quiet. Today, Nnam plans to wipe his image off the objects.
A week ago Nnam took a month off work and sent her sons, Lumumba and Sankara, to her parents in Uganda for Kayita’s last funeral rites. That is why she is naked. Being naked, alone with silence in the house, is therapy. Now Nnam understands why when people lose their minds the first impulse is to strip off. Clothes are constricting but you don’t realize that until you have walked naked in your house all day, every day, for a week.
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Kayita died in the bathroom with his pants down. He was forty-five years old and should have pulled up his pants before he collapsed. The more shame because it was Easter. Who dies naked on Easter?
That morning, he got up and swung his legs out of bed. He stood but then sat down again as if he had been pulled back. Then he put his hand on his chest and listened. Nnam, lying next to the wall, propped her head on her elbow and said, “What?”
“I guess I’ve not woken up yet.” He yawned.
“Then come back to bed.”
But Kayita stood up and wrapped a towel around his waist. At the door he turned to Nnam and said, “Go back to sleep.