Kritika Pandey from India has been declared the overall winner of the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for her story “The Great Indian Tee and Snakes”. Acclaimed Ghanaian writer and editor Nii Ayikwei Parkes, chair of the judging panel of this year’s edition, presented the award in an online ceremony on Tuesday.
The Commonwealth Short Story Prize first chooses five winners, one from each of its five regions: Asia, Africa, Canada and Europe, Caribbean and the Pacific. Kritika, winner of the Asia region, beat out the other four regional winners to win the title of the overall winner. All the regional winners’ stories will be published online by the literary magazine Granta.
Kritika Pandey, who is the second Indian national to win the overall prize, will receive £5,000. Her award winning story is set in a small town tea seller’s stall. Terming it a “haunting story of forbidden love in contemporary India”, a press release by the Commonwealth Foundation says that the story “tells of an unlikely friendship which reaches across religious divides.” In the story two young people try to solve an age-old riddle of human existence: how love can overcome the forces of hatred and prejudice. Nii Ayikwei Parkes described her work as a “gut-punch of a story, all the more shocking in its charged conclusion given that most of it is set at a tea seller’s and its energy derives from a few looks between a boy and a girl”.
29 years old Kritika Pandey is a Pushcart-nominated writer from Ranchi, Jharkhand. She completed her MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and is a recipient of a 2020 grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. She also won 2020 James W. Foley Memorial Award, the 2018 Harvey Swados Fiction Prize, the 2018 Cara Parravani Memorial Award in Fiction.
The 2020 Prize attracted over 5,000 entries from 49 countries. Bangladeshi Writer Nafisa A. Iqbal’s short story “The Shedding” made the shortlist for the Asia region.
For this year, the regional winners are: Africa winner Innocent Chizaram Ilo (Nigeria), Canada and Europe winner Reyah Martin (United Kingdom), Caribbean winner Brian S. Heap (Jamaica), and Pacific winner Andrea E. Macleod (Australia).
The Commonwealth Short Story Prize is awarded annually for the best piece of unpublished short fiction.