Portia Subran wins Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Caribbean

The Commonwealth Foundation has announced the regional winners of the world’s most global literary prize. Writer Portia Subran, from Trinidad and Tobago, has won the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the Caribbean.

Subran, 35, from Caroni, saw off strong competition from four other shortlisted writers from the region: Stefan Bindley-Taylor and Celeste Mohammed (both from Trinidad and Tobago), Ark Ramsay from Barbados, and Heather Archibald from St Kitts and Nevis.

She will go through to the final round of judging and the overall winner will be announced on June 26, a media release said.

Subran’s regional-winning story, The Devil’s Son, is the story of Gabriel, a retired oilfield worker. A song jolts the memory of a retired oilfield worker to a simpler time and forces him to relive a dark secret he kept buried for many years. Set in the 1950s, The Devil’s Son recounts how the Promethean tool of electricity transformed life in the village of Chaguanas: as Gabriel puts it, "Papa did tell me it was a good thing that we were going to get electricity, because the kinda darkness we in, it does let the mind run mad with superstition."

Subran, who studied at UWI, St Augustine, is a former Cecile de Jongh Literary Prize and Small Axe Literary Short Story competition winner.

She cites Dr Merle Hodge’s Millicent character as her inspiration to become a writer.

She said in the release, "I have a compendium of ancestral information fermenting inside my head, and I have no choice but to weave them and create something that will last for future Trinbagonian generations to one day reflect on. The men and women in my family are heroes and inspire me."

Commenting on the background to her story, she said, "My maternal grandmother escaped an arranged child-marriage by jumping out the window on her wedding night and running back to her mother’s house. After watching their mother starve to death, my maternal grandfather and grand-uncle, children of an illegitimate Hindu marriage, fought off an abusive relative and started a whole new life on their own.

"Caribbean experiences are laced with anger, laughter, pleasure, sadness and secrets. My story The Devil’s Son is no different. The setting is based on the pre-independent memories of my parents, but the plot grew out of my own thoughts on superstition, grief and the lies we tell ourselves (and others), to ensure our survival."

The judge representing the Caribbean region, poet and author Richard Georges from the British Virgin Islands says in the release, "Portia Subran's The Devil's Son is immense, gripping – a wonder. The writer holds an earnest reverence for the musicality of language, and the magic that courses through the Caribbean landscape, and utilises both to create a tale that harnesses horror, myth, and the colonial utility of religion to explore a deeply personal, family trauma.

"The story poses questions of history and memory, objective and subjective truth, and metaphorises the advent of electricity in central Trinidad as a fledgling epistemology challenging the religious hegemony. This is a memorable story that balances darkness with bright humour, a testament to the writer's remarkable voice and brilliant technique."

The story was selected as the regional winner for the Caribbean by an international panel of judges, chaired by Ugandan-British novelist and short-story writer Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, who is joined by five judges drawn from the five regions of the Commonwealth. They are South African writer Keletso Mopai (Africa), Singaporean short story writer, screenwriter and novelist O Thiam Chin (Asia), Canadian writer and editor Shashi Bhat (Canada & Europe), poet and author Richard Georges from the British Virgin Islands (Caribbean), and award-winning Australian Bundjalung writer Melissa Lucashenko (Pacific).

The five regional winners’ stories will be published online by the literary magazine Granta, ahead of the announcement of the overall winner on June 26.

As part of the Commonwealth Foundation’s partnership with the London Library, the overall winner receives two years’ full membership to the library and the regional winners receive a year’s full membership.

The Commonwealth Short Story Prize is awarded annually for the best piece of unpublished short fiction from any of the Commonwealth’s 56 member states.

Full list of regional winners:

Africa: Dite by Reena Usha Rungoo (Mauritius)

Asia: Aishwarya Rai by Sanjana Thakur (India)

Canada and Europe: What Burns by Julie Bouchard (Canada) (translated by Arielle Aaronson from the French, Ce Qui Brûle)

Caribbean: The Devil's Son by Portia Subran (TT)

Pacific: A River Then the Road by Pip Robertson (New Zealand)