Fireball image via Canva Pro.
Each year, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize awardees attract great interest in the Caribbean, and it's not just because Caribbean people relish a well-told story. Many regional and overall winners of the prize have gone on to have flourishing writing careers, including Diana McCaulay, Kevin Jared Hosein, Barbara Jenkins, Sharon Millar, Ingrid Persaud, and perhaps most notably, Earl Lovelace, the “literary giant” who was recently honoured at the opening of the Bocas Lit Fest 2025, the same year as his 90th birthday.
The Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which seeks out the best pieces of unpublished fiction writing, generally attracts anywhere between 6,000 and 7,000 entries, but the 2025 edition saw a “record-breaking” 7,920 entries from almost all of the eligible 56 countries of The Commonwealth, highlighting the growing enthusiasm for this prestigious literary award that remains one of the most promising avenues through which emerging Caribean writers can gain international recognition.
The shortlist was announced on April 15 and included writers of all ages from 18 Commonwealth countries, including, for the first time ever, Antigua and Barbuda and Saint Lucia. With one exception, none of this year's writers had been shortlisted before.
The regional winners — one from each of the five regions of the Commonwealth — were revealed on May 14, with Guyana's Subraj Singh topping the Caribbean region with “Margot's Run,” a story about a new mother “venturing into the night to protect her child from a bloodthirsty creature.”
One of the judges for the Caribbean region's entries, author Lisa Allen-Agostini, described the winning regional submission as “the story of a mother’s breathless dash through the Guyana landscape in an effort to outwit an Ol’ Higue which has been attacking her infant son.”
Ol’ Higue, as the folklore character is called in Guyana, is known as the blood-sucking soucouyant in other parts of the Caribbean. The character even inspired an eponymous poem by Guyanese writer Mark McWatt that remains on the regional secondary school literature curriculum.
In Singh's story, the desperate new mother Margot seeks to best the creature by exploiting its vulnerabilities, reclaiming her own power in the process. She chooses the night of Guyana’s first Independence Day to take on the Ol’ Higue, just as the country's white colonists are leaving, after generations of extraction and exploitation.
Compellingly, as if to make the narrative echo the determined advancement of Margot's mission, “the majority of the story is written in a single sentence, which burns as bright as the light of the Ol’ Higue’s fireball.” Allen-Agostini describes the work as “brilliant,” “evocative,” and “action-packed” as it “lays bare the vampiric nature of the colonial system.”
Singh himself, in describing the piece as “authentically Caribbean,” says it is essentially “a story about family — whether biological family or found — and its role in creating spaces of safety and sustenance in times of great adversity.”
According to Kritika Pandey, who was the overall winner in 2020, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize is a must for “writers who challenge the continued dominance of Eurocentric literature and consider their works to be as global as they are local.”
This year's judging panel is chaired by Vilsoni Hereniko, a writer and filmmaker from Fiji, who noted, “A great story moves us, causes us to think, and sometimes changes us. This shortlist of relevant, vibrant, and essential reading is made up of the best 25 stories from a pool of almost 8,000 entries. Together, they demonstrate why the short story form must continue to be supported and promoted.”
Find Singh's entry here. The overall winner of this year's competition will be announced on June 25 at the Commonwealth Short Story Prize Award Ceremony.
