So... I was working on my editing website a while ago and I did a Google search using the name of the site and my own name (Charmaine Rousseau) as keywords. to check whether Google's web crawlers had picked up the site. Right at the very top of the first page of results I saw something that made me pause: my name in conjunction with a prize that I had submitted a story to then completely forgotten about it.
This is how I found out that I had been longlisted for the BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Award 2022. (BCLF stands for Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival.) Seriously. I got no email or anything of the sort; this might have flown completely under my radar if I hadn't been randomly searching for something else at some witching hour, as is my wont.
Was I happy to find that I'd been longlisted? Thrilled, in fact. It's been quite a few years since I was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize (2014) and I've been very lazy about submitting stories to comps in the intervening years. What can I say? A whole lot of life has been happening. (Excuses, excuses...)
Congratulations to the winners of the award: Yvika Pierre (Haiti) won the BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writer’s Prize, and Alexia Tolas (The Bahamas) won the BCLF Short Fiction Story Contest 2022. Pierre's story is "Nadege Goes Home" and Tolas' is "The Fix". The results were announced on September 3, 2022.
