CMC – Jamaican writer, Kwame McPherson, has won the overall prize of the 2023 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, defeating nearly seven thousand entrants worldwide for the £5,000 (One British pound=US$1.27 cents) prize.
The Commonwealth Foundation in announcing McPherson’s win during an online award ceremony, said the winning story “Ocoee” interweaves Caribbean folklore and stories from African American history.
“It centres on an exhausted driver who is pulled over by the police on a lonely road outside Ocoee. As he hears about the terrible history of the town, he also rediscovers a connection with his own past.”
The online award event was hosted by Jamaican journalist, Dionne Jackson Miller and featured the 2023 Chair of the judges Pakistani writer Bilal Tanweer, this year’s international judging panel, the five regional winners, and 2022 #CWprize winner, Ntsika Kota.
The Foundation said that McPherson, who this year entered the prize for the eighth time, beat off 6,641 entrants worldwide.
‘When I began my writing journey, it was not a conscious decision, it was just something I enjoyed doing. Creating and imagining worlds, sharing occurrences and experiences that brought no end of joy in seeing a reader engage and find pleasure in what I have produced,” McPherson said.
“Having the ability to provoke thought, interest or move a reader from one mental and emotional state to the next, is a skill within itself and one I have been blessedly bestowed with and do not take for granted. The culmination of that ability is where I am today, winning a prestigious award, not only for the Caribbean but for the entire Commonwealth.”
“That is no mean feat. I am humbled since I stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before, especially those scribes, griots and storytellers of our story, fulfilling a purpose I now live, walk and breathe. I am extremely proud I have represented my many friends, family and, importantly, my country Jamaica, in the way that I have,” he added.
Tanweer said “Ocoee’ forces a reckoning with the challenge that confronts all writers in the postcolonial world: how to write about a world that has been destroyed without any traces.
He said McPherson takes on the extraordinarily difficult challenge of writing about a past that has left no evidence of its existence.
“Ocoee’s accomplishment is how it achieves this thorny task with simplicity, humility, and real heart. It is a story that resonates deeply and leaves us with a glimpse of all the ghosts that continue to haunt the present, and, in the process, performs one of the most essential tasks of writing: to bear witness to our condition, and to remind us, again, what it means to be human,” Tanweer said.
The five regional winning stories will be published online by the literary magazine Granta on May 24 and they will also be published in a special print edition by Paper + Ink, from June 27.
