For the first time, a translated story wins the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
The prize is an award that invites entries of short stories from writers in the Commonwealth regions. The stories are divided by region, Africa, Asia, Canada and Europe, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. A winner from each region is announced as well as an overall winner.
Eligible stories include all unpublished short stories of length 2000-5000 words in Bengali, Chinese, English, Greek, Kiswahili, Malay, Portuguese, Samoan, Tamil and Turkish, and in translation into English from any language.
This year the overall prize went to Death Customs by Constantia Soteriou from Cyprus. It was written in Greek and translated into English by Lina Protopapa, a translator and cultural critic based in Cyprus. It is the first translated story to win the prize.
The story is about the women in Cyprus; mothers or wives who believed that their beloved persons were missing after the 1974 war, even though the state had clear evidence of their death. The story is about death customs, memories, bitterness, and justice.
Caryl Phillips, the Chair of Judges said, " Death Customs is a remarkable short story that manages to be both personal – following, as it does, the painful narrative of a woman who has lost her son – and deeply political, in that it charts the division of a land as it topples into civil war.
We are encouraged to view the descent into bloodshed and mayhem as a domestic squabble between two brothers who can only be reconciled in death. The voices employed are beautifully resonant, and the story shifts gears, and ranges across time, with eloquence. Death Customs is poetically intense and complex in form and subject-matter, yet the story remains admirably lucid and moving, and deservedly wins the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize."
The author is no stranger to awards, her first novel Aishe Goes on Vacation won the Athens Prize for Literature award and her second book Voices Made of Soil was shortlisted for the Cyprus Literature Awards. She said, "I feel honoured and happy to win this amazing prize; it feels like a reward for all the hard work I have been doing over the last eight years, writing about the perspectives of women on the political and historical events of Cyprus.
This prize is a recognition for giving voice to those who did not have the chance to be heard before; those who were left behind to pick up the mess of the war. I grew up seeing the faces of the mothers and the wives of the missing people; those were the real victims of the war. Women should not be victims of any war. Women are the continuation of life. I wrote this story to salute their strength."
The story will be published in Granta and is available to read online on their website right now, along with the stories of all the regional winners. The other winners are, Madam’s Sister by Mbozi Haimbe from Zambia, My Mother Pattu by Saras Manickam from Malaysia, Granma’s Porch by Alexia Tolas from The Bahamas and Screaming by Harley Hern from New Zealand.
All regional winners will be awarded £2,500 and the overall winner will recieve £5,000.