Deadline: November 1, 2022
About the competition
The prize is free to enter and open to any citizen of a Commonwealth country who is aged 18 and over. It is awarded for the best piece of unpublished short fiction (2,000–5,000 words). Regional winners each receive £2,500 and the opportunity to be published online by Granta magazine, and the overall winner receives £5,000.
View the panel of judges for the 2023 Commonwealth Short Story Prize here.
As well as English, stories are accepted in the Bengali, Chinese, Creole, French, Greek, Kiswahili, Malay, Portuguese, Samoan, Tamil and Turkish languages. Translated entries from any language into English are also eligible. If the winning story is a translation, the translator receives additional prize money.
Competition guidelines
- Entries, including those in translation, must be made by the original author.
- Entries will only be accepted via the online entry form.
- The deadline for receipt of entries is 1 November 2022 (11.59pm in any time zone).
- Only one entry per writer each year may be submitted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
- The story must be the entrant’s own work.
- The story must be original work and should not have been published anywhere, in full or in part, in any language, before 1 May 2023. 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, except for personal blogs, personal websites and personal Facebook pages.
- Entries previously submitted to the Commonwealth Short Story Prize are not eligible.
- Entries should be submitted in English, with the following exceptions: entries from Commonwealth citizens who write in Bengali, Chinese, Creole, French, Greek, Kiswahili, Malay, Portuguese, Samoan, Tamil and Turkish and who do not have an English translation of their story, may submit their stories in the original language. English translations of short stories written in other languages are eligible if submitted by the writer (not the translator) and provided that the translator is also a citizen of a Commonwealth country.
- Simultaneous submissions are eligible as long as the entrant informs the organisers (via [email protected]) immediately should the story be accepted for publication elsewhere or be selected for a prize.
- Entries must be 2,000 words minimum, 5,000 words maximum (not including title).
- Read the whole rules and guidelines here.
- Enter the competition here.
