Chanel Sutherland’s Descend Wins 2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize
By Jerry Adesewo
Saint Vincent-born Canadian writer Chanel Sutherland has been announced as the overall winner of the 2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for her haunting and poetic tale, Descend. The announcement was made yesterday, June 25, at the global virtual prize ceremony hosted by the Commonwealth Foundation.
Sutherland’s Descend, which had earlier won the Canada and Europe regional prize, beat four other regional winners from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Pacific to claim the prestigious £5,000 award. The story, set in the final moments of a slave ship’s descent, is a profound and lyrical meditation on loss, memory, resistance, and the unbreakable human spirit—even in the face of erasure.
Chair of Judges, Dr. Vilsoni Hereniko, described Descend as “a poetic and profound journey through one of history’s darkest chapters,” praising Sutherland’s craft, sensitivity, and ability to give voice to those too often left voiceless. “Her story does what great fiction should—it moves us, haunts us, and lingers,” he said.
Sutherland began writing Descend on a flight to a writer’s retreat in Greece. A sudden lightning strike mid-flight triggered a visceral inspiration that shaped the emotional tone of the story.
“I didn’t intend to write a story about the Middle Passage,” she shared, “but the feeling of being suspended in fear, in uncertainty, led me there.”
This win marks another major milestone for Sutherland, who previously won the 2021 CBC Nonfiction Prize, was a finalist for the CBC Short Story Prize, and was named one of CBC Books’ “30 Writers to Watch.” Her debut collection, Layaway Child, is due out in 2026 from House of Anansi.
2025 Regional Winners
The 2025 shortlist included strong contenders:
Joshua Lubwama (Uganda) – Mothers Not Appearing in Search
Faria Basher (Bangladesh) – An Eye and a Leg
Subraj Singh (Guyana) – Margot’s Run
Kathleen Ridgwell (Australia) – Crab Sticks and Lobster Rolls
All regional winners received £2,500 and will be published on Granta.
The Commonwealth Short Story Prize, administered by the Commonwealth Foundation, remains one of the most important literary prizes for emerging voices across the Commonwealth’s 56 member states. This year, the competition drew thousands of entries written in English, as well as in Bengali, Malay, and other regional languages.
With Descend, Chanel Sutherland joins an illustrious list of past winners and cements her place as one of the most powerful literary voices of her generation. Her win is not only a personal triumph but a broader recognition of the enduring strength of diasporic narratives, ancestral memory, and the redemptive power of fiction.
“This story is not just mine,” Sutherland said in her acceptance speech, “it belongs to those whose names we’ll never know—but whose stories we must continue to tell.”
Chanel Sutherland’s Descend Wins 2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize