Join us for a special evening as we celebrate the 2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize winners.
For more than a decade, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize has recognised the best short fiction from the Commonwealth regions of Africa, Asia, Canada and Europe, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. This year’s stories feature compelling characters including a new mother protecting her child from a bloodthirsty creature, a football-obsessed boy who befriends a woman against his mother’s wishes, and a young woman who is literally falling apart.
Hosted by Neha Dixit, don’t miss this incredible opportunity to hear from the winners as they discuss their sources of inspiration, what drives them as writers, and the significance of literature in today's world.

Joshua Lubwama is a software engineer and writer based in Kampala, Uganda. He was longlisted for the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the 2023 and 2024 Afritondo Short Story Prizes. His work appears in The Anatomy of Flying Things and Travelling Men Don’t Die. Joshua is 25 years old.

Faria Basher is a writer of Bengali origin who has lived across the Philippines, the United Kingdom and the United States. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Edinburgh and a master’s degree from New York University. Though a long-time reader, she only recently began writing. Faria is drawn to the offbeat, the absurd and the odd—and brings these elements to her fiction.

Chanel Sutherland is a Vincentian-Canadian writer of fiction and creative nonfiction. Her debut short story collection, Layaway Child, will be published by House of Anansi in 2026. Chanel won the 2021 CBC Nonfiction Prize and the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize, and received the 2022 Mariruth Sarsfield Mentorship. CBC Books named her one of 30 Writers to Watch in 2022.

Subraj Singh is a writer from Guyana. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland, and is an alum of Clarion West and Tin House. He is a former resident of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. His fiction has been published in AGNI, New England Review, and Gulf Coast Journal.

Kathleen Ridgwell is a writer from Perth, Western Australia. She was runner-up in the 2024 EM Fletcher Award for her short story The Emerald Dove. Kathleen has spent her career working in community services, advocating for disadvantaged and vulnerable people. She writes to amplify the voices of those often unheard.

Neha Dixit is an independent journalist and author based in New Delhi. She has covered politics, gender, and social justice for 18 years. Most of her work is investigative, narrative and long-form. She reports for Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, Caravan, The Wire and other notable publications.

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The ‘stream and book’ package includes a unique ticket for the stream, and a copy of Descend & other stories (RRP £4.99) deliverable to a UK address.
The event will initially be broadcast on 9 September at 6.30pm UK time. It will be available to view up to two weeks after the event has ended and can be accessed Worldwide. If you live in a time zone that does not suit the initial broadcast time you can watch it at any point after the initial showing for two weeks.
If you have any questions, please email [email protected].