Cypriot writer Constantia Soteriou was on Wednesday announced the overall winner of the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for her piece Death Customs.
Soteriou’s Death Customs, translated from Greek to English by Cyprus-based translator and cultural critic, Lina Protopapa, is the first translated work to win what the organisers described as the most global literary prize in the world.
Soteriou’s story Death Customs is about the women of Cyprus, mothers or wives left to believe that their beloved individuals were missing after the 1974 war, while the state had clear evidence about their death.
The story looks into the themes of death customs in Cypriot culture, memories, bitterness and justice.
“Death Customs is a remarkable short story that manages to be both personal -following, as it does, the painful narrative of a woman who has lost her son– and deeply political, in that it charts the division of a land as it topples into civil war. We are encouraged to view the descent into bloodshed and mayhem as a domestic squabble between two brothers who can only be reconciled in death. The voices employed are beautifully resonant, and the story shifts gears, and ranges across time, with eloquence,” this year’s judging panel chair, playwright and essayist Caryl Phillips, said.
Constantia Soteriou, born in Nicosia in 1975, said “I feel honoured and happy to win this amazing prize. It feels like a reward for all the hard work I have been doing over the last eight years, writing about the perspectives of women on the political and historical events of Cyprus.”
She added that “this prize is a recognition for giving a voice to those who did not have the chance to be heard before, those who were left behind to pick up the mess of the war. I grew up seeing the faces of the mothers and the wives of the missing people; those were the real victims of the war. Women should not be victims of any war. Women are the continuation of life. I wrote this story to salute their strength.”
Soteriou won an Athens Prize for Literature for her first booked published in 2015 called, Aishe Goes on Vacation. It is a story that deals with the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 and the direct aftermath for the people of the island.
The Commonwealth Short Story Prize is awarded for the best piece of unpublished short fiction (2,000–5,000 words) in English. Regional winners receive £2,500 and the overall winner receives £5,000. Translated entries are also eligible, as are stories written in the original Bengali, Chinese, Greek, Kiswahili, Malay, Portuguese, Samoan, Tamil and Turkish.
