Join us for a special evening as we celebrate the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize Winners.

For the past decade, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize has recognized the best short fiction from the Commonwealth regions of Africa, Asia, Canada and Europe, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. This year’s winners are masters of their craft, who triumphed in the most competitive year yet for the prize. Their stories explore themes ranging from love and loss to complex parental relationships and a woman’s passion for tea.

Hosted by Ellah Wakatama, 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.

Reena Usha Rungoo, winner for the African region, is a Mauritian writer, scholar, teacher, speaker and mother. As an islander, an African and a diasporic South Asian, she uses the language of fiction (whether as a writer or a literary critic) to speak on how colonial violence infiltrates our beings, our languages and our desires, and on the creative ways in which we resist. She is an assistant professor of literature at Harvard University.

Sanjana Thakur, winner for the Asia region, has a degree in English and Anthropology from Wellesley College and is currently pursuing an MFA in Fiction at UT Austin’s New Writers Project. Her short story Backstroke was published in The Southampton Review. She is from Mumbai.

Portia Subran, winner for the Caribbean region, 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, lived experience and ole talk gathered over the years. She is the winner of the 2019 Cecile de Jongh Literary Prize from The Caribbean Writer (University of the Virgin Islands) for her short story Twice the World, and the 2016 Small Axe Literary Short Story Competition for Mango Feast. She is published in Pree Lit Magazine and The Caribbean Writer.

Julie Bouchard, winner for the Canada and Europe region, is a native and resident of Montréal, and has released two collections of short stories and a novel over the last decade with La Pleine Lune, a Québec-based publishing house. She was awarded the Radio-Canada Short Story Prize in both 2020 and 2021. She currently works in academic publishing.

Pip Robertson, winner for the Pacific region, has had short stories published in journals and anthologies in print and online. She has an MA from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington. She lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa New Zealand, with her partner, daughter and dogs.