Sanjana Thakur wins £5k Commonwealth Short Story Prize for her 'adoption story in reverse'

Indian writer Sanjana Thakur has been announced as the overall winner of the £5,000 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for her story "Aishwarya Rai", fending off competition from 7,359 entrants.

The Commonwealth Foundation announced her win at an online ceremony, presented by New Zealand’s former poet laureate Dr Selina Tusitala Marsh. The winning story is described as an "adoption story in reverse", and tells the story of a young woman seeking to "hire an ideal mother".

As part of the Commonwealth Foundation’s partnership with The London Library, the overall winner receives two years’ full membership to the library and the regional winners receive a year’s full membership. The literary magazine Granta has published all the regional winning stories of the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, including "Aishwarya Rai". The five stories are also available in a special print collection from Paper + Ink.

The judge representing the Asia region, Singaporean short-story writer, screenwriter and novelist O Thiam Chin, said: "Sanjana Thakur’s ‘Aishwarya Rai’ astounds with its hypnotic prose and lyrical magic realism, pulling readers into the compelling story of a young woman’s earnest but fumbling search for an ideal mother. Unrestrainedly candid and full of unshielded candour, the story extracts dark humour from the wry, absurd observations of contemporary life, imbuing every scene with grit and compassion."

Chair of the judges, Ugandan-British novelist and short-story writer Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, added: "The short-story form favours the brave and the bold writer. In ‘Aishwarya Rai’, Sanjana Thakur employs brutal irony, sarcasm, cynicism and wry humour packaged in tight prose and stanza-like paragraphs to confront us with the fracturing of family and the self as a result of modern urban existence. No matter which city you live in, you’ll recognise the stress-induced conditions like insomnia, restless leg, panic attacks and an obsession with a ’celebrity’ kind of beauty, in this this case, Bollywood."

Thakur added: "I’ve spent 10 out of 26 years living in countries not my own. India, where I’m from, is simultaneously strange and familiar, accepting and rejecting. Writing stories is a way for me to accept that Mumbai is a city I will long for even when I am in it; it is a way to remake ‘place’ in my mind. I feel that the Commonwealth Short Story Prize offers that chance to all of us: to be a writer who is from ’somewhere’, to write from inside a legacy of colonialism and migration."

Kwame McPherson from Jamaica won the prize last year for his story "Ocoee".