Trini writer wins Commonwealth Prize

TT writer Kevin Jared Hosein has won the 2018 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. The annual prize was awarded today in Cyprus.

Hosein’s winning story Passage was named the Caribbean regional winner of the contest in June and went up against winners from Africa, Asia, Canada, Europe and the Pacific for the overall prize. TT writer Sharon Millar was a joint winner of the prize in 2013 with her story The Whale House and TT/Barbados writer Ingrid Persaud won last year with The Sweet Sop.

Novelist and poet Sarah Hall, chair of the 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.”

Newsday interviewed Hosein last month after his regional win. In a follow-up conversation in response to the overall win, he said, "I felt both surprised and incredibly honoured. They basically said, 'Kevin, yours was top of the pile.' That's a pile of more than 5,000 stories. That was crazy for mine to end up there. This Trinidadian tale. But it's a theme that resonates universally – isolation. Because we all have experienced it. Especially writers. I'm just glad my faith in this story paid off."

Hosein is the author of three books; his most recent novel, The Beast of Kukuyo, was published this year after it won a prize in the 2017 CODE Burt Awards for Caribbean Literature. He said his next project is “a Caribbean horror novel. There aren't much of those.”

-LAA