Aishwarya Rai & Other Stories

The Commonwealth Short Story Prize, now in its thirteenth year, has been awarded for the best short fiction from the Commonwealth regions of Africa, Asia, Canada and Europe, the Caribbean, and the Pacific.

In “Aishwarya Rai”, the overall winning entry in 2024 by the Indian writer Sanjana Thakur, a woman exchanges different mothers from a service that provides them, attempting to bond with each one – with mixed results. It is a poignant portrait of a troubled individual in search of belonging and acceptance.

The other winning stories – by Reena Usha Rungoo (Mauritius), Julie Bouchard (Canada), Portia Subran (Trinidad and Tobago) and Pip Robertson (New Zealand) – feature, respectively, an intimate and critical appraisal of Mauritian colonial history; an intense, existential parsing of the aftermath of a building fire; a rollicking tale of an infernal buffalo terrorising a Caribbean village; and a young girl’s coming of age in the care of her inept, dangerously self-centred father.

The Commonwealth Short Story Prize is a prestigious annual award for the best work of unpublished short fiction from within the Commonwealth. Managed by the Commonwealth Foundation, it was set up to inspire, develop and connect writers and storytellers across the five global regions.