Three T&T writ­ers have been short­list­ed for the Com­mon­wealth Short Sto­ry Prize.

The an­nu­al com­pe­ti­tion this year re­ceived a record near­ly 4,000 en­tries, and an­nounced its short­list on March 31. Twen­ty-two sto­ries from 11 coun­tries made the cut, in­clud­ing sto­ries by Dar­ren Doyle, Kevin Jared Ho­sein and Tood­esh Rame­sar.

Doyle is a blog­ger with a jour­nal­ism BA, ac­cord­ing to the bio-da­ta on the Com­mon­wealth Writ­ers Web site.

Ho­sein is a po­et, writer and sci­ence teacher, and the il­lus­tra­tor of Lit­tle­town Se­crets, a 2013 chil­dren's book. He has been pub­lished in the an­tholo­gies Pep­per­pot and Jew­els of the Caribbean.

Rame­sar is a writer and lit­er­a­ture teacher, and in 2005 won the Derek Wal­cott and UWI Fac­ul­ty of Hu­man­i­ties Prize for Po­et­ry. He was pub­lished in Six Trinida­di­an Po­ets and the jour­nal The Caribbean Writer.

The on­ly oth­er re­gion­al writer in the short list is Ale­cia McKen­zie, a Ja­maican writer, artist and jour­nal­ist whose books in­clude the short sto­ry col­lec­tions Satel­lite City and Sto­ries from Yard, and the nov­el Sweet­heart.

The judg­ing pan­el in­clud­ed Leila Aboulela, Fred D'Aguiar, Ma­ri­na En­di­cott, Witi Ihi­maera, Bi­na Shah and chair Ro­mesh Gune­sek­era. The five re­gion­al win­ners drawn from this short­list on April 28.

T&T writer Sharon Mil­lar was joint win­ner of the over­all 2013 Com­mon­wealth Short Sto­ry Prize.

Ex­cerpts from short­list­ed sto­ries

Mad­ness

Tood­esh Rame­sar

It is mid­night, week­end, and the house, the rum-shop flat, is emp­ty, save for him and me.

He goes past the door where I lie in the nar­row bed fac­ing the musty store room with about a hun­dred emp­ty rum bot­tles, re­filled with milk some­times in the week and, on Sat­ur­day evenings es­pe­cial­ly, with the six bot­tle pun­cheon glass gal­lon with a neck han­dle poured and mixed in an enam­el pot that makes sev­en. I use a dhal-spoon and a lit­tle yel­low or red or or­ange plas­tic fun­nel to re­fill sev­en bot­tles, all equal at the neck, crown tight and sil­ver-shiny, the dog-eared copy-book from Sat­ur­day evening that I car­ried to the ham­mock back in the draw­er in the counter.

Sat­ur­day evening is pay-day, the dozen work­men men com­ing and go­ing one at a time from the bench un­der the up­stairs house, where Baap will lat­er sit and talk with my fa­ther, he in Eng­lish, grand­fa­ther in Hin­di about truck and cane and logs and cows and land and mon­ey.

The King of Set­tle­ment 4

Kevin Jared Ho­sein

I'm gon start this one off by telling you that I was born and raise along a back­road that al­ways seemed slight­ly more Trinida­di­an than the rest of the coun­try. Set­tle­ment 4 is that old-timey, grassy, care-free type of Trinidad the il­lus­tra­tors adore. Open any Caribbean pri­ma­ry school read­ing book and you gon like­ly see it there.

We have it all.

We have the lit­tle black boys bathing by the stand­pipe. We have the no-teeth man who rock-hard gums could cut through cu­cum­ber like but­ter. Take a walk down this mucky stretch of as­phalt and look to your right. You'll see a young, preg­nant Miss La­dy comb­ing the lice out of the locks of she first-born. To the left, you'll see a sun-burnt sa­van­nah where chil­dren still fly mad bull kites next to a posse of no­mad goats. Walk fur­ther down and you gon find a rust­ed sedan with chipped bricks for wheels, and weeds grow­ing out of the glove com­part­ment.

But then there's the fea­tures that we il­lus­tra­tors would omit. Fea­tures of boys like me and Fos­ter who had plans to spend the bet­ter part of we teenage years sit­ting on a crate and paint­buck­et. Makeshift look­out points, you could say.

Zoe

Dar­ren Doyle

"You livin' aroun' here?" And sud­den­ly she was tra­vers­ing the hills and val­leys of the lo­cal ac­cent. She had cap­tured and re-cre­at­ed the rhythm and ca­dence, the lilt­ing, sing-song. The quick-fire, splice-and-eli­sion de­liv­ery to come. It was im­por­tant to main­tain the in­tegri­ty of the ac­cent.

A mis­step and you might be mocked, laughed at, looked at with gen­tle, turned down smiles; un­con­vinced, unim­pressed. He watched the words out her mouth, they soared through the air like a dart... And land­ed. Bulls-eye.

He imag­ined her fly­ing be­tween one coun­try and the next, and half-way be­tween the two switch­ing ac­cents, an easy thing like flick­ing a switch, no one the wis­er where she came from. The strange du­al­i­ty of it, like ba­bies born dur­ing in­ter­na­tion­al flights. What na­tion­al­i­ty did they gave them be­yond the na­tion­al­i­ty of their par­ents?

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