Second Place
Sort by:
True Story
Toyin Ojih Odutola & Yaa Gyasi
‘What if our art had not been stolen, our people not enslaved? What if we imagined a good story, a righteous and just story, and then we worked to make it true?’
In Conversation
Anthony Caleshu & Peter Gizzi
‘Words are haunted. Think of it: as long as there have been soldiers there have been poets. I have often felt that being a poet is a form of civil disobedience.’
The Museum of Whales You Will Never See
A. Kendra Greene
‘The Icelandic Phallological Museum is smaller than you’d think. The domestic collection of 212 specimens fits in one room.’
The Celebration
Cathy Sweeney
‘I had just come home from boarding school when Father took me aside and told me that Mother was up to her old antics, letting the whole family down, and that if she continued, we’d have to act.’
This Compost: Erotics of Rot
Elvia Wilk
‘Mushrooms sprout from the bathtub grout; disintegrating apples overflow from the trash can. Insects circle. The decomposition is lively and sensorially overwhelming.’
Mother-Wit
Jeffery Renard Allen
‘It would be many years before I understood that around my mother’s sober acceptance of the status quo was a whole culture she had developed for our subsistence and well-being.’
Bonsai
Guadalupe Nettel
‘Bonsai have always prompted a kind of fear in me, or at least a puzzling discomfort.’
Mr A
Stephanie Soileau
‘At the front of the line, Jabowen and Mr A are talking. Or, more than talking, really. Julie has noticed this before – it’s impossible to miss – but today it worries her more deeply than she can quite admit.’
Children in Tactical Gear
Peter Mishler
‘we watched the last / very colorful weapons / coming ashore’
Seeing Things
Emily LaBarge
‘The City of the city is jagged and spiky, tangled, twisted – burned down, paved over, rebuilt, unruly with wealth and poverty side by side, as they have always been.’
Feeling Bullish: On My Great-Uncle, Gay Matador and Friend of Hemingway
Rafael Frumkin
‘In his suit, with his pigtail and his montera, he was pure potential: he could be masculine vanquisher or gold-embroidered fairy. He was both, actually, at all times, and nobody who came to see him fight thought any less of him for it.’
The Poetry Vaccine
Peter Pomerantsev
‘The quarantine and the closure of borders was giving my father Cold War flashbacks. And while Covid-19 was reducing life and death to statistics, father was using literature to affirm individuality.’
The Art of Waving
Andrea E. Macleod
‘I was only nine when I took to practicing the art of not waving. I felt an exhilarating power surge inside me and I ran all the way home, punching the air as I went.’
Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness?
Kevin Brazil
‘You never can wholly control the things you cling to. But you can figure out what has made you the surface you are.’
The Great Indian Tee and Snakes
Kritika Pandey
Kritika Pandey’s ‘The Great Indian Tee and Snakes’ is the overall winner of the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize as well as the regional winner from Asia.
An Education
Ariel Saramandi
‘Once, early on, before he learned such things were never said, my brother approached a white boy in his class with my mother’s maiden name and said they must be cousins. The violence in my family’s home started a year or so later.’
In Conversation
Andrzej Tichý & Nichola Smalley
‘In many ways, every author is a kind of extremely complex sampler.’
Death in Her Hands
Ottessa Moshfegh
‘Isn’t it sweet to look back at how my mind jumped to the most innocuous conclusion? That after so many years, at seventy-two, my imagination was still so naive?’
A Woman of No Information
Caoilinn Hughes
‘Maud tries to understand how her role is being rewritten on the spot – who the woman might be.’
The Flowers Look More Beautiful Now Than Ever
Mieko Kawakami
‘It’s hard to imagine a country where a lockdown would function perfectly, but in the case of Japan, which lacks basic individualism, the current situation has bred insidious hatred and division.’
This Happy
Niamh Campbell
‘How does a person waste her twenties like that? The answer of course being easily indeed. As easy as can be.’
The Covid-19 Pandemic
Jane Goodall
Jane Goodall on animal welfare, the long history of zoonotic diseases and what we must learn from Covid-19.
Commuting Through Coronavirus
Kikuko Tsumura
‘My friend and her colleagues are being told not to get infected. Infections among employees will affect the company’s reputation, and would be an inconvenience to clients.’
Notes on Craft
Naoise Dolan
‘If something is usually done in novels, but I can’t actively justify doing it, then I don’t do it.’
The Kobold
Daisy Hildyard
‘In a plain material sense the condition of being alive is that of living inside this contradiction – being membrane-bound.’
Pew
Catherine Lacey
‘The church has no thoughts. The church is brick and glass. If they ever slept there, they would see that.’
Trees, Disease
Philip Marsden
‘The greatest problem with the recent enthusiasm for tree-planting is disease. Large-scale projects mean large-scale movement of tree stock, which in turn has helped spread a number of highly contagious arboreal pathogens.’
Notes on Craft
Alan Rossi
‘The whole universe emerges and lives through this little consciousness that we call our self.’
