By: Staff Writer
May 23, 2023
The Commonwealth Short Story Prize Caribbean finalist finally got in on his eighth attempt at entering the contest and is “grateful” to have finally won after years of trying and thanks the “spiritual essence” of being back home in Jamaica as the inspiration to focus on a noteworthy piece.
Kwame MA McPherson, spoke to Caribbean Magazine Plus that being in Jamaica paid off for him being the regional finalist for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize this year. Out of nearly 6,500 entrants from around the world, he is recognized as the top Caribbean entrant.
Kwame has also written several other books that have been featured on the University of the West Indies. He is also won the bursary award for the Kit de Waal Bursary for Flash Fiction with The Bridport Prize: International Creative Writing Competition, which is one of the largest and most prestigious prizes in the English speaking world with prizes up to $10,000 for short poems or essays.
Kwame has recently returned to Jamaica last year after years of living in the United Kingdom and calls the freedom he has to create mentally satisfying. “I think being back in the Caribbean has definitely helped with the writing.”
Something connected while being back and it felt “spiritual essence being in the Caribbean, especially Jamaica,” he said.
Jamaica is known for attracting writers and novelists like Ernest Hemmingway and poets like Mervyn Morris, who have called Jamaica home for their inspiration and so many other writers over the years.
Kwame also said that he is looking forward to hearing who wins the overall prize and he is “quite confident,” in his entry Ocoee,” for this year’s Prize.
Ocoee is a city in Orange County, Florida, United States. According to the 2019 US Census population estimate, the city had a population of about 49,000. When asked why Ocoee, Kwame said that Ocoee was an African American town in the early 20th Century that was razed to the ground in a massacre that he felt he needed to capture in words.
On November 2, 1920, after July Perry and Mose Norman, two Black men, attempted to vote and encouraged other Black people to vote, the entire Black population of the town was attacked by a mob organized by the Ku Klux Klan. On the night of the massacre, white World War I veterans from throughout Orange County murdered dozens of African-American residents.
At least 24 Black homes were burned, the institutions constituting the Black community were destroyed, and Perry was lynched. Before the massacre, Ocoee’s Black population numbered approximately five hundred; after the massacre, however, the Black population was nearly eliminated. For more than 40 years, Ocoee remained an all-white sundown town.
In 2018, the city commission issued a proclamation formally acknowledging the massacre and declaring that Ocoee is no longer a sundown town.
Kwame said about his writing moving forward that he’s always writing and is focusing his attention on the African diaspora now and is realizing that that it is having more resonance in regards to the messages that need to be coming out, because a lot of people don’t know about the “horror stories” across the African diaspora. So he decided to focus on telling more stories and it’s been “successful” since he started to focus on building long term stories about black people.