Master of Business Administration (MBA) alumnus Kwame McPherson’s short story Ocoee has won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2023.
The Commonwealth Short Story Prize is awarded annually to the best piece of unpublished short fiction from the Commonwealth. For the 2023 prize, over 6600 short stories were submitted across all five of the Commonwealth regions in 11 languages. Having already been awarded the prize for the Caribbean region, Kwame’s short story Ocoee has also been announced as the overall winner of the global literature prize across all categories.
The award was presented by Jamaican journalist Dionne Jackson Miller in an online ceremony by the Commonwealth Foundation. Kwame is the first Jamaican to win the prize. Prior to his success in the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, Kwame was a 2007 Poetic Soul winner and the first Jamaican Flash Fiction Bursary Awardee for The Bridport Prize in 2020. His work has been published in Flame Tree Publishing’s diverse-writing anthologies and is to be published in the forthcoming in The Heart of a Black Man anthology, which tells personal empowering stories from influential Black men.
Kwame’s winning short story Ocoee is described as a “mishmash of African American reality and history, and Caribbean folklore”, drawing on the breadth and depth of stories across the African diaspora. The story takes its name from a town in Florida which was the site of a brutal, racially motivated attack in November 1920. Kwame’s story weaves together the terrible history of the town with the present day, connecting its characters across generations to learn about their history and themselves.
Chair of the judging panel, Pakistani writer and translator Bilal Tanweer, said: “Ocoee forces a reckoning with the challenge that confronts all writers in the postcolonial world: how to write about a world that has been destroyed without any traces. Kwame McPherson takes on the extraordinarily difficult challenge of writing about a past that has left no evidence of its existence. Ocoee’s accomplishment is how it achieves this thorny task with simplicity, humility, and real heart. It is a story that resonates deeply and leaves us with a glimpse of all the ghosts that continue to haunt the present, and, in the process, performs one of the most essential tasks of writing: to bear witness to our condition, and to remind us, again, what it means to be human.”
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