Kritika Pandey from India has won the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Asia for her story “The Great Indian Tee and Snakes”.
The other writers who made the shortlist for Asia are Nafisa A. Iqbal from Bangladesh, Dinesh Devarajan from India, Sharmini Aphrodite from Malaysia and Maham Javaid from Pakistan.
For the overall winner of the prize, which will be announced on June 30, Kritika will compete with the other regional winners for Africa, Canada and Europe, the Caribbean and the Pacific. The overall winner will receive £5000 and each regional winner £2500.
The five regional winners have been selected from over 5,000 entries by a six-member judging panel, chaired by Ghanaian writer and editor, Nii Ayikwei Parkes.
The regional winners’ stories will be published online by the literary magazine Granta.
Asia region’s winner Kritika Pandey is from Ranchi, India. The 29-year old author is a final year MFA candidate at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She was previously nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Nafisa A. Iqbal, who represented Bangladesh in the shortlist for Asia with her story “The Shedding”, was born and raised in Dhaka. In 2015, she moved to New York in the US, where she graduated from The New School in graphic design. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the Columbia University in New York.
The other regional winners are:
- Africa – Innocent Chizaram Ilo (Nigeria) for “When a woman renounces motherhood”
- Canada and Europe – Reyah Martin (United Kingdom) for “Wherever Mister Jensen Went”
- Caribbean – Brian S Heap (Jamaica) for “Mafootoo”
- Pacific – Andrea E Macleod (Australia) for “The art of waving”
The Commonwealth Short Story Prize is awarded annually since 2012 for the best piece of unpublished short fiction.
