Kanya bags big prize with tale about the powerless
View(s):
Kanya D’Almeida. Pic by Maria D’Almeida
Sri Lankan author Kanya D’Almeida has won the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.Kanya’s win was announced in an online award ceremony on June 30. She is the first Sri Lankan to win the overall prize and the second to win for the Asia region.
“Winning the Commonwealth Short Story prize during this moment of global upheaval feels like a tremendous honour and an equally tremendous responsibility. It makes me question what it means to be a writer in these times, times when the human imagination might offer us our best shot at survival. I’ve long felt that fiction is the last ‘free’ place on earth in which to fully envision (and execute!) radical alternatives to the often dismal systems that govern us. To have won the prize for a story about two destitute, ageing women in Sri Lanka digging through the debris of their lives in search of a little dignity is more than a blessing—it’s a firm order from the universe to keep inventing ways for the powerless to gather together, giggle together, and win,” said Kanya in a news update by Commonwealth Writers.
Kanya’s winning story, ‘I Cleaned The— ’, is a story about domestic labour, abandonment, love and human waste. Khademul Islam, Bangladeshi writer, translator and editor and Asia Judge for the prize, described the story as “a life-affirming story of love among the rambutan and clove trees of Sri Lanka—love for a baby not one’s own, love for a high-spirited elderly woman. Love found not among the stars but in human excrement. Literally. And all the more glorious for it.”
The 2021 prize was judged by an international panel of writers, each representing one of the five regions of the Commonwealth, and chaired by South African writer Zoë Wicomb.
Zoë Wicomb, Chair of the Judges, commented on the use of the short story form and its exploration of “the themes of love and death in an ingenious structure” in Kanya’s award-winning short story.
“In a frame narrative, Ishwan cares for a terminally ill fellow-inmate, and embedded within it is a story she tells her friend about her previous years of caring for a severely debilitated child. The narration is an accomplished interweaving of the two time frames in which the stories artfully testify to love in its various forms. For all its scatology, its depiction of the unsavoury body in decline, ‘I Cleaned The-’ deals in delicacy and the forbearance that love bestows. With a title that speaks of the unspoken and the unutterable, as well as attempts by the poor and overlooked to voice their feelings, D’Almeida appeals to both the heart and the mind of the reader in this portrayal of unspeakable injustice,” Wicomb said in a press release.
The Commonwealth Short Story Prize is free to enter and is awarded annually for the best piece of unpublished short fiction from the Commonwealth. It is the only prize in the world where entries can be submitted in Bengali, Chinese, English, French, Greek, Malay, Portuguese, Samoan, Swahili, Tamil and Turkish.
The latest edition drew 6423 entries from 50 Commonwealth countries. Submissions for the 2022 Commonwealth Short Story Prize will open on September 1, 2021.
Kanya holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Her fiction has appeared in Jaggery and The Bangalore Review. She is working on a book of short stories about women suffering from mental illness and is the host of ‘The Darkest Light’, a podcast exploring birth and motherhood in Sri Lanka.
Kanya D’Almeida’s award-winning story can be read online on Granta https://granta.com/i-cleaned-the/
For more information on the prize, see: https://www.commonwealthwriters.org/
To read the Sunday Times interview with Kanya, please visit https://sundaytimes.lk/ and view the May 9, 2021 edition, Plus Section.
A.I.