The 2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize will open for entries from 1 September 2024 to 1 November 2024.

The prize is free to enter and open to any citizen of a Commonwealth country aged 18 and over. It is awarded for the best piece of unpublished short fiction (2,000–5,000 words).

An international judging panel of writers will select a shortlist of around twenty stories, from which five regional winners are chosen. One of the regional winners is then selected as the overall winner, who receives £5,000. The regional winners will receive £2,500. All five regional winning stories will be published on Granta.

The prize is only open to short fiction, but it can be in any fiction genre–science fiction, speculative fiction, historical fiction, crime, romance, literary fiction–and you may write about any subject you wish.

Stories written in the following languages are accepted: Bengali, Chinese, Creole, English, French, Greek, Malay, Maltese, Portuguese, Samoan, Swahili, Tamil, and Turkish. Stories that have been translated into English from any language are also accepted and the translator of any winning story receives additional prize money.

We are keen to encourage quality, so suggest writers to check their stories before submitting using Prowritingaid. They have free and paid versions and are the best writing software we know to help improve grammar, readability and check for repetition, ‘sticky’ sentences and suggest alternatives.