Hosein Wins 2018 Commonwealth Short Story Prize

“Passage” by Kevin Jared Hosein is the overall winner of the £5,000 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, awarded for the best piece of unpublished short fiction in English, announced during a ceremony on July 25, 2018 at the Centre for Visual Arts and Research in Nicosia, Cyprus. Hosein was earlier announced as the regional winner for the Caribbean, for which he was awarded £2,500. Sarah Hall, chair of this year’s judges, said:

Our winning story, Passage, was immediately and uniformly admired by the judges. It is an uncanny bar story, about a man who hears a strange tale, only to become part of the tale’s re-lived strangeness. It balances between formal language and demotic, ideas of civility and ferality, is tightly woven and suspenseful, beautifully and eerily atmospheric, and finally surprising. It is, in essence, all a reader could want from the short story form; a truly crafted piece of fiction that transports the reader into another world, upends expectations, and questions the nature of narratives and narrative consequence.

Hosein’s story is available to read on Granta.

For more information, see the official prize website.

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