Commonwealth Short Story Competition 2025
1 November 2024
The search for some of the Commonwealth’s best short story writers has begun again. Commonwealth citizens aged 18 and over can enter a short story of 2000 to 5000 words for a chance to win £5 000.
The Commonwealth Short Story Prize is awarded for the best piece of unpublished short fiction.
- The regional winners receive £2 500.
- The overall winner receives a total of £5 000.
- The winning stories are published online by Granta and in a special print collection by Paper + Ink.
- The shortlisted stories are published in adda, the online literary magazine of the Commonwealth Foundation.
The prize is only open to short fiction, but it can be in any fiction genre–science fiction, speculative fiction, historical fiction, crime, romance, literary fiction–and you may write about any subject you wish.
They accept stories written in Bengali, Chinese, Creole, English, French, Greek, Malay, Maltese, Portuguese, Samoan, Swahili, Tamil, and Turkish. Stories that have been translated into English from any language are also accepted. If the winning short story is a translation into English, the translator will receive an additional prize of £750.
Your submission must be unpublished in any print or online publication, with the exception of personal websites.
The prize is free to enter and open to any citizen of a Commonwealth country aged 18 and over. Please see the full list of Commonwealth countries here.
The Commonwealth Short Story Prize is open for submissions until 1 November 2024.
For any inquiries regarding the prize, please email: creatives@commonwealthfoundation.com