Indian writer Sanjana Thakur wins the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize
The 26-year-old writer won the prize for her short story ‘Aishwarya Rai’, in a field of 7,359 entrants, followed by five regional winners.
Join our WhatsApp Community to receive travel deals, free stays, and special offers!
- Join Now -
Join our WhatsApp Community to receive travel deals, free stays, and special offers!
- Join Now -
Sanjana Thakur, a 26-year-old writer from Mumbai won the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for her story “Aishwarya Rai”. She will receive a cash prize of £5,000.
Taking its name from the Bollywood actor, “Aishwarya Rai” reimagines the traditional adoption story: a young woman, Avni, chooses between possible mothers housed in a local shelter. The first mother is too clean; the second, who looks like the real-life Aishwarya Rai, is too pretty. In her small Mumbai apartment with too-thin walls and a too-small balcony, Avni watches the laundry turn in her machine, dreams of stepping into white limousines, and tries out different mothers from the shelter. One of them must be just right…
Sanjana Thakur, who is currently pursuing an MFA in Fiction at UT Austin’s New Writers Project, described her story as a “Mumbai story”. She added: “I’ve spent ten 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…”
The Chair of the judges, Ugandan-British novelist and short...
