Why is the Commonwealth Short Story Prize so wilfully boring?

Sorry, but it’s embarrassing at this point

If there really was a vibe shift, nobody told the judges of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Every year since 2012, the transnational organisation of former colonial states has run a short story competition, receiving thousands of entries, and every year they seem desperate to choose the most mawkish, didactic story they possibly can as its winner. The winners are published in Granta¹, so you can read them for free and in full; there are winners from each region – Europe and Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and the Pacific – and then an overall winner picked from those five.

Every year, this competition strays deeply into the worthy and the portentous. For example, here’s the explanation of the short story which won overall this year, as told by its author.² The story is called ‘Descend’:

My story, ‘Descend’, explores the memories of enslaved Africans as the ships that transports them starts to sink.

Above all, it is about the illuminating power of memory. How the telling and listening of stories can remind us of our humanity amidst violence and trauma.

Writing this story, and imagining the most precious memories of enslaved Africans, took tremendous care and felt like a big responsibility.

The characters in my story had their histories and stories forcibly erased. Creating a space for readers to reflect on this was important to me.

So – the short story is positioned less as an artform and more as a social tool with which to encourage readers to reflect, a way to “create a space”.³ Fair enough, that’s a decision you can make, though the blurb is more than a little self-regarding. I don’t disagree that the compassion inherent in imagining someone’s experience of being transported across the Atlantic is extremely worthwhile, though. It’s good that people want to write about the transatlantic slave trade.

The story starts off fine, if a little derivative:

Down below, deep in the belly of the ship, we could hear its every moan: wood straining under the weight of bodies, rusted chains grinding against the walls. Even our captors’ feet shuffling back and forth, back and forth, above us. We knew death had come.

[…]

Nothing could save us from the stink of pus and piss, spilling across the floor, the air thick with it and clinging to our skin, our breath, until it became part of us – until we could no longer tell where the stench ended and we began. In this way, we became one – a part of each other, through misery, shit and blood.

Again, fair enough – I suppose this gives me an idea of how wretched conditions on a slave ship would have been (assuming I didn’t already know). But, eventually one of the slaves on the ship begins to recount his memories to the others, and tells them a love story. It’s the story of how he fell in love with the daughter of the village healer, and eventually asked her father for her hand in marriage:

I remember the day I asked. Her father, a quiet man with rough hands and a hard stare, sat across from me in their hut, sizing me up. I could see the doubt in his eyes, the way he hesitated before he spoke. ‘You know she is not like other girls,’ he said, as a warning. ‘She won’t change. If you marry her, you’ll have to live with all that comes with her – those strange ideas, the way she thinks.’

I just… I just know this trope so well, to the extent that I have already written a whole blog post on it. It’s the trope of the wilful historical young woman, who is (somehow) a progressive second-wave feminist despite living in (let’s assume) 18th-century West Africa. She doesn’t want to be a bride or a mother. She cares “more for plants and rain than for marriage and children”. She is literally “not like other girls”.

The man’s wife goes on to plant new plants amid the cassava and maize, to “heal the land”; this becomes an encapsulation of every imagined indigenous person’s somehow inherent relationship to the earth, almost Biblical in its didacticism.

The second story told on the ship – which by now has begun taking on significant amounts of water – is about an young girl who goes to gather rare bitter flowers outside her village to help another woman through childbirth. The third, in brief, is about a little boy who dreams of being a warrior but is too skinny. Eventually the boy runs away, and kills a porcupine, attempting to pluck it with his bare hands:

They watched him, this boy with bloody hands, the porcupine slipping between his fingers, and they realized he had never been lost. He had been searching too, not for a way home, but for a way to prove he belonged. And in that moment, they saw not a child, but a warrior – one who might be small, but had a heart that was fierce, and hands that would not stop, even when they were trembling, even when they bled.

I’m sorry, but I have read these rote tropes before – everywhere. He “might be small, but had a heart that was fierce”? That could be a line from Moana. Or any other Disney film. Transplant this story to Western Europe and it’s about as original as the blacksmith’s son who dreams of becoming a knight. If you want to tell the stories of the slaves who died during transportation – if you really feel the pressure of inventing their lives to “remind us of their humanity” – don’t just reheat sentimental clichés.

Elsewhere, flat style undermines the heavy subject matter. Consider this bit from one of 2023’s winning stories, “Ocoee”, in which the (black, importantly) narrator, a Gulf War veteran, encounters two aggressive white cops while driving through rural Florida:

‘Can I’ve your name and badge number?’ He did not answer. Instead, he pointed the light at the rear seat as if looking for something. I could see him better with the deflected light and noticed his hand on his sidearm. I was not about to comply, I had seen too many incidences of Black men stepping out of their vehicles and dying. A friend of mine ended up that way. It was heartbreaking attending his funeral and watching his family, especially his mother, wailing and in complete sorrow. I wanted to kill those cops who had killed him.

It’s so clunky. “Heartbreaking”, was it, to attend the funeral of an innocent kid shot by the racist cops? And his mum – “in complete sorrow”, was she? Can’t you give me a bit more than that?

In another passage, the narrator considers taking a break on the drive:

I made up my mind that the next town would be the place I laid my head for the night. Especially with that creeping tiredness touching my eyes, which drooped a few times with the intention to close. I fought against it as best I could. I wanted some hot food. The last time I properly ate was five hours ago, and eating junk food was not healthy at the best of times.

There’s something entirely unartful about “with the intention to close” and “eating junk food was not healthy at the best of times”. Anyway – the narrator decides to stop in the next town, Ocoee:

A blob that was not there before had appeared on my GPS. The name of the place was Ocoee. I squinted. There was a town up ahead; I could see lights on the horizon and building outlines. Its name made no impression on me, and sounded like one those haunted places always found in the back of some beyond. I snickered at my own joke. I was not that way inclined to be afraid of the dark.

Sorry – snickered at what joke?

Eventually, it turns out the narrator has somehow travelled back in time to historic Ocoee, Florida, a real town where there was a massacre committed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1920, but before the event, when it had a thriving black population. The premise is similar to The Shining, I suppose. A woman leads him to the guesthouse:

The woman was medium height, and shapely with a welcoming oval face took my elbow and steered me across the empty street. It was just as empty as before.

‘How come there are no cars on the road?’ I asked. ‘And where are all the white people?’

She regarded me with mysterious brown eyes. I noticed how they danced as if she knew something I did not. I knew those questions to be right since nothing added up for me about Ocoee.

Can a question be “right”? I get what the author is trying to say – the questions are the right ones to be asking – but the phrasing is poor.

It might sound like I am complaining because these stories are about groups of oppressed people in history; that they are somehow too woke, too preoccupied with slavery and racism and other progressive shibboleths. I promise you I am not. Both these stories deal with subject matter that’s more than worthwhile to write about (though I do think that ultimately the judges might do better to consider something other than these po-faced tales of exploitation and oppression).

Instead, my complaint is stylistic. These wooden stories plod along and rely on tropes to manipulate you into thinking they are deep. They are genuinely unoriginal. They’re sentimental and humourless and are clumsy in their choice of language. They raise the question of whether one should excuse bad or average style just because a story deals with weighty subject matter.

The other problem is that there’s no discernible voice. Among the prize winners, certainly, all the stories read in pretty much the same portentous register, but more importantly, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize itself has no voice. Think about it; if you write something for The Fence or The Stinging Fly or Futurist Letters, you sort of know what they might be after, right? In the same way a non-fiction piece might suit the New Yorker but not Vice. These magazines and journals don’t want all their submissions to be the same, of course, but you could certainly make a judgment as to what they were after – they each have a voice.

But what exactly are the Commonwealth judges after?

Full disclosure: I’ve entered this competition twice (so you can chalk this whole complaint up to sour grapes, if you like).

The first time round, I deliberately wrote a story I thought the judges might like. It was about an impoverished young girl who goes to pick cockles in the Wash, alone, on the day of the Queen’s coronation in 1953. She uncovers the crown jewels lost by King John and digs them up and puts them in her bucket, but the tide comes in too quickly and one at a time, she is forced to abandon the huge bars of gold which otherwise would transform her hardscrabble life. The story ends with her running back for shore empty-handed as the water rushes in around her knees.

It’s not a brilliant story, and it didn’t deserve to win or probably even be commended. But I find it difficult to honestly say that the winning story this year was any better.

This year, I sort of took the piss and wrote a high-concept story which aimed to mimic Naomi Kanakia’s quick Thursday stories. It was told from a little more distance, set in modern-day America, and followed an unnamed protagonist who inexplicably grew in height when something good happened to him, and shrank when something bad happened. Just a couple of inches each time. The protagonist has a very topsy-turvy life, working in tech, making millions and losing them, and grows and shrinks like mad, though nobody else notices outright – he just becomes more attractive and tall when things are going well, and is literally diminished by bad fortune.

It was definitely a more ambitious story to tthe one I wrote the year before, and I much prefer it, even as it was a lot more abstruse. I was under no illusions that it would win – it used the phrase “blow job” precisely once, which I reckon made it immediately illegible for commendation – but I was quite happy with it.

There is one short story, which won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize last year, that I like a lot. It’s called “Aishwarya Rai”, and it’s very weird and cool. It definitely has a voice. It’s thought-provoking and quite difficult to summarise. It makes you furrow your brow. The first twenty lines or so are masterful:

The first mother Avni brings home is too clean. She wears white at all times, perpetually a mourner, and roams the two-bed flat with a feather duster tied to her slim wrist. ‘Don’t I look just like Aishwarya Rai?’ she asks, and pours bleach into the bathtub and onto her body. Scrub-a-dub-dub. Avni asks her no questions and takes her straight back.

At the shelter, they lead her to the back and shoot her. ‘She’s had multiple placements,’ they explain. ‘Sometimes, this is the humane option.’

The second mother is mean, and very, very beautiful. This one actually does look like Aishwarya Rai, Avni thinks. A star. She buys a weighing scale and makes Avni stand on it and watch the numbers wobble.

‘Too high!’ she decides when they steady.

‘Let’s play a game,’ Avni says, stepping off the scale. She crosses her arms over her body and watches as she shrinks in the mirror. ‘Would you rather have a fat, happy daughter, or a daughter who is thin and sad?’

The second mother doesn’t hesitate: ‘Thin.’

‘And sad.’

‘Yes,’ she agrees.

Avni nods. ‘How do you sleep?’

‘Too well,’ she confesses. ‘Like a baby.’

The shelter people take her back, no problem. She has a highly desirable look, they say, and will find another home quickly. And does Avni want to take another look around?

Avni does.

“Aishwarya Rai” reminds me of other stories that I have enjoyed in recent months, and rather than just criticise the winners and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize itself, I thought I’d offer a handful of short stories I read recently which I thought would be worth celebrating.

The first is “Cornucopia” by Ella Fox-Martens. It follows an isolated, internet-sick loner who becomes obsessed with watching mukbang videos of another woman called Milena. (It has a great first line: “By the end of winter, I couldn’t fall asleep unless I was watching Milena eat.”) You might initially think the story is apolitical, but to me it packs anticapitalist and feminist ideas into the shell of a psychological thriller, without relying on didacticism. It’s every bit as thoughtful as ‘Descend’, to me, but also a lot of fun.

Another one is Sam Kriss’s mad blood sacrifice story-cum-essay on Married at First Sight, “Dreams never end” – surely a better postcolonial tale than any entered in the Commonwealth’s competition this year. It drives home the pure creepiness of the colonial project, the uncanny nature of taking Scots-Irish convicts and putting them on Australia. I guess you might argue it’s not a story, but it is.

I already mentioned her, but Naomi Kanakia’s stories often make me think. Like many of her subs, I signed up to her newsletter, Woman of Letters, after reading her textured, considered short story about that eternal Substack obsession: male novelists and their lack or otherwise of representation in publishing. It’s clever and mature, but it’s also current and political – at least to an extent – and it engages with the subtle vagaries of real-world identity politics. It feels like a distant cousin of Mary Gaitskill’s MeToo-era “This is Pleasure”.

Finally, Eva Wiseman wrote a weird little thing in The Fence a few months ago, called “The Knife”. Again, it has a great opening: “The school called Anna at half-past 12 on Monday and asked why she’d put a thumb in her son’s packed lunch. ‘Hang on,’ she said, ‘Let me just take you somewhere quieter.’” Come on, man – how could you not love that?

1. This is of course the same Granta which every decade publishes its list of up-and-coming novelists, whose past editions have picked out Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Pat Barker, Martin Amis and Hanif Kureishi, among others. They know their shit.

2. I’m not naming authors here because that seems harsh – a criticism of someone’s writing is necessarily a personal attack, but I don’t intend to criticise these writers as individuals so much as the choices the Commonwealth Short Story Prize consistently makes in picking its winners. The writers themselves are very passable, but I don’t think they are the best that the 2.7 billion inhabitants of the Commonwealth have to offer...

3. Sadly, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo are nowhere to be seen.