As PREE expands its borders to welcome contributions from the Global South, so too do the concerns of the entries expand, not just across the globe, but also in scope, intent, and ambition. The shortlist cut across genres, as indicated by my final selection of winners – one suite of poems, a short story, and a lyric essay – and as a previous contributor to this publication, as well as an editor and organiser so aware of the important work of platforming creative work in these spaces from this place, I was immensely proud of my privilege to perform this duty. My (blind) reading over the past few weeks compiled an impressive and encouraging collection of writing rich with the sort of passion to provoke, to ask more questions rather than assume the answers, to really explore the implications of the themes included in the call of the editors.

Ultimately, the burden of the reader (like the writer) is to make choices. To decide which of the shortlisted entries were deserving of an award, and grimly, which were not. I will take an indulgence in this judge’s note to make clear that what I have done cannot be seen as an objective exercise. Perhaps you may find in this issue another voice you deem more lucid or elegant. For what it’s worth, I have valued here the craft of the line, the feeling that the writer has been intentional in the choices they have made, that they are discovering, like us, that they do not have all the answers, that sometimes the most sacred power held by the vulnerable is the power to ask a question.

One such question arrives in the entry I have selected for honourable mention. In ‘The Price of a Full Gele’, Faith Egwuchukwu ponders the many and varied erasures that are demanded of women in exchange for the social and religious acceptance symbolised by the iconic headwrap. To do so, the writer teleports us to a moment in her youth amidst the pews of a charismatic church where the particular vulnerability of a fellow worshipper brings the social precarity of her entire gender into focus.

‘Continuity’ by Kevin Jared Hosein, a stirring piece of speculative fiction, is third. This is a story where the most compelling parts of it are not the popular sci-fi trope of a space ark escaping the doomed Earth, but rather how chillingly familiar the bureaucracy of exclusion becomes. One by one, all those great multinational organisations the downtrodden nations of the world look to for justice (climate, social, or political) fail us, just as they continue to do now. But what was most beautiful here is how the Caribbean somehow always makes space for itself, even when “there is no space left in the story of the wider world”, even then “the kiskadees are still singing” in the face of apocalypse. After all, as the narrator reminds us – “nothing can exist by itself”.

The poet Georgio Russell is a startling new voice, and the poems that earned him second place betray an assurance and confidence of craft. Russell’s imagistic approach does not neglect the nuances of sound, with musically alliterative passages such as in ‘Through Babylon’, “alarm/and lecture in her dialect, the hasty/summary of blood spilled before”. I do not wish to do him the disservice of comparison, but in a time that celebrates at once the obvious didactics as well as unapproachable opaqueness, Russell is a refreshing new writer. A lyricist delighting in the language of the everyday.

Richard Georges is the first Virgin Islands Poet Laureate (2020) and the author of three collections of poetry, as well as essays and fiction. His most recent collection, Epiphaneia (2019), won the 2020 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. His first debut, Make Us All Islands (2017), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and his second book, Giant (2018), was highly commended by the Forward Prizes and longlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize. His next collection of poems, Shore/Lines (2027), is forthcoming from Peepal Tree Press in the UK and Akashic Books in the US.
A recipient of a Fellowship from the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study, and a Pushcart Prize nominee, Richard holds a PhD in Critical and Creative Writing from the University of Sussex, and is a Founding Editor of Moko. He currently serves as the seventh president of H. Lavity Stoutt Community College in Tortola. Richard is working on a novel and is represented by Elise Dillsworth.