Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2018 (Up to £15,000 for Winners)

 

Deadline: November 1, 2017

Entries are invited for the 2018 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. The Commonwealth Short Story Prize is an annual award for unpublished short fiction administered and funded by the Commonwealth Foundation. The Commonwealth Short Story Prize is part of Commonwealth Writers, the cultural initiative of the Commonwealth Foundation. The Commonwealth Writers was set up in 2012 to inspire and connect writers and storytellers across the world. They believe that well-told stories can help people make sense of events, engage with others and take action to bring about change.

Prize

• There will be five winners, one from each region. One regional winner will be selected as the overall winner;
• The overall winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize will receive £5,000 and the remaining four regional winners £2,500. If the winning short story is a translation into English, the translator will receive additional prize money.

Eligibility

• The prize is open too writers from the following regions and countries:

• Africa: Botswana, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia. Overseas Territories: St Helena, Tristan Da Cunha, Ascension Island.
• Asia: Bangladesh, Brunei Darussalam, India, Malaysia, Maldives, Pakistan, Singapore, Sri Lanka.
• Canada and Europe: Canada, Cyprus, Malta, United Kingdom. Overseas Territories: Gibraltar, Falkland Islands.
• Caribbean: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago. Overseas Territories: Anguilla, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Montserrat, Turks and Caicos Islands.
• Pacific: Australia, Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu. Overseas Territory: Pitcairn.

• Entrants must be citizens of a Commonwealth country listed above. The Commonwealth Foundation will request verification of citizenship before winners are selected. Writers from non-Commonwealth countries (including the Republic of Ireland and Zimbabwe) are not eligible;
• For regional purposes, entries will be judged by country of citizenship. Where the writer has dual citizenship, the entry will be judged in the region where the writer is permanently resident;
• Entrants must be aged 18 years or over on November 1, 2017;
• There is no requirement for the writer to have current residence in a Commonwealth country, providing she/he is a citizen of a Commonwealth country;
• All entries will be accepted at the discretion of the Commonwealth Foundation which will exercise its judgement, in consultation with the prize chair as necessary, in ruling on questions of eligibility. The ruling of the chair on questions of eligibility is final, and no further correspondence will be entered into.

Entry Requirements

• Entries including those in translation must be made by the writer;
• Entries will only be accepted via the online entry form;
• The deadline for receipt of entries is November 1, 2017 (11.59pm in any time zone);
• Only one entry per writer may be submitted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize;
• The story must be the entrant’s own work;
• The story must be original and should not have been published anywhere in full or in part before May 1, 2018. Published work is taken to mean published in any printed, publicly accessible form, e.g. anthology, magazine, newspaper. It is also taken to mean published online, with the exception of personal blogs and personal websites;
• Entries previously submitted to the Commonwealth Short Story Prize are not eligible.

Application

• Before you enter your story, do make sure you read the entry guidelines which you can download here as a PDF or Word Doc.

Entries for the 2018 Commonwealth Short Story Prize can be submitted here.