The Commonwealth Foundation announced the winners of its prestigious Short Story Prize on May 13. Five winning stories – one each from Africa, Asia, the USA and Canada, and the Caribbean and Pacific regions – were selected before the announcement of an overall winner. Aside from a small cash award, each writer's story is published on the website of famed London-based literary magazine Granta. Granta has a long and storied history of publishing the early works of authors who eventually make their way into the literary canon. Sylvia Plath, EM Forster and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie figure among a long list of acclaimed writers who were “launched” by the magazine. To most writers, being published in Granta and joining those distinguished ranks is a career-defining moment. Granta is not itself involved in the selection process for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, but lays the path for the winning writers to find their audience. The winner from the Caribbean region – a Trinidadian man Jamir Nazir – was one of the five selected from 7,806 entries this year. Nazir’s story "Serpent in the Grove" may be among the most-discussed stories in Granta’s history – for all the wrong reasons. Just days after it was released, readers noticed something odd about Nazir's writing. Postcolonial literature – from Derek Walcott to Jamaica Kincaid and Binyavanga Wainaina – is known for language play, but Nazir wrote lines that at best were a vague (“Her hair is midnight rain; her laugh is bright as zinc”, “Wilfred’s rum-shop leaned into the road like a rotten tooth”) and at worst, completely incomprehensible (“The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink”).