It is the season of the Commonwealth short story. The Commonwealth Foundation in London has awarded the 2023 Commonwealth Short Story Overall Prize to Kwame McPherson of Jamaica for his story “Ocoee”. This will be properly addressed in a future column since today, in keeping with the season, we turn our attention to another example of the great promise in Commonwealth short fiction writing: an example from new Guyanese literature.
Among the winning entries in the 2022 Guyana Prize for Literature, writers old and new indicated the current directions in which fiction has moved. This is fiction rooted in Guyana as a place with cultural traditions that persist in the memory of the older writers and shine in the imagination of the younger scribes.
One of most promising among the latter is Makeda Braithwaite who won Third Prize for the Best Book of Fiction for her first collection of short stories An Anthology of Shivers (2022). She emerges as the nation’s most outstanding new talent since Subraj Singh. Like him, she was an English Major at the University of Guyana, where she is currently employed in the department dealing with public relations, editing and the University Press.