PREE 15 marks a watershed moment for our platform, created eight years ago to showcase the work of writers from, on and about the Caribbean. From the beginning PREE’s existence has been precarious; an open-access platform with no revenue sources to pay ourselves or the large team of writers and editors who generously contribute their time and care to the cause of nurturing and furthering Caribbean writing. We have survived on a shoestring budget supplemented by a small grant from The Prince Claus Fund (PCF) in 2022. Then in 2024 we received a generous three-year grant from the Fund’s Fertile Ground project. If PREE has been able to grow and flourish since 2018 when we first waved our proof of life at the world it has largely been due to the enthusiastic support of the PCF, an organization whose tagline, “Culture is a basic necessity” has nurtured many an organization like ours in the Global South (GS).
It was through the PCF that we became aware of the huge potential of expanding PREE’s terms of reference to include the Global South. In 2025 we published a special issue titled The Fertile Ground Stories that included refreshingly innovative texts by 21 PCF seed awardees located all over the world. Meanwhile we seemed to have plateaued in terms of the range and quality of general submissions from Caribbean writers. How to jook PREE back to vibrant currency became a concern. Fortunately, in late 2025 another benefactor came to the rescue and we became one of the Hawthornden Foundation’s grantees just as our three-year grant from the PCF was ending. In 2026 we also received a small grant from the Caribbean Culture Fund (CCF).
Clearly, it was time to expand our scope. The Hawthornden grant allowed us the leeway to experiment with opening up PREE’s submission window to entries from the Global South. The grant also enabled us to offer monetary awards for the top 3 submissions. We were pleased to have poet and educator Richard Georges, the editor of Moko magazine, adjudicate the winning entries. Please read the announcement of the winners and his comments here. Would these changes help reorient us? We were scarcely prepared for what ensued as we received 4 times as many submissions as usual, of significantly higher quality than our norm, with several impressive pieces from Nigerian writers, in particular.
PREE 15’s themes of precarity, fragility and vulnerability seemed to strike a chord with many of the authors who sent us their work. The Caribbean has always epitomized instability, irrelevance even, but 2026 underscored our lack of heft. The brazen removal of Venezuelan President Maduro from Caracas accompanied by the threat issued against Cuba’s sovereignty by the US regime has reinforced local feelings of insignificance and impotence in a world where the rule of the jungle – only the biggest and strongest shall survive – seems to prevail once again.
PREE 15 reflects a range of elaborations of our theme: imperial/geo-political violence, structural precarity, access to basic rights and institutions, social vulnerability intensified by climate catastrophe and marginalized and queer identities under pressure. Several stories reference the targeting and elimination of fishing boats and Eastern Caribbean fishermen in the vicinity of Venezuela, allegedly lurking ‘with intent’, amid accusations of drug-smuggling from our weighty Northern neighbour. These charges are vigorously denied by the affected communities, but what recourse do they have in a post-international justice Trumpian era? Bodysurfing, Piece of Sea and The Fisherman all centre the casual aggression and violence of current American geopolitics.
Across stories, precarity isn’t portrayed as a single hardship but as an interlocking system. Brackish, by Nigerian writer Christian Emecheta, a story shuttling between St Lucia and the Dutch city of Rotterdam, captures another kind of contingency: displaced life replacing one instability with another. Storms become financial, bureaucratic, and political, and help comes with strings attached that exploit desperation. The recurring social message: institutions often manage vulnerable people not through care, but through conditional aid and structural coercion.
“We were all here for the same reason: because the places we loved could no longer sustain us, and the places that could did not love us back.”
In The Education of Marlene Joseph, also by a Nigerian, Oluwanifemi Bakare, social inequality is rendered through the daily logistics of deprivation in Haiti: school access contingent on personal finances; chalk purchased by a teacher because ministry allocations have run out; an interview framed around “resilience.” The teacher’s testy refusal of the tired euphemism becomes a direct social critique: what outsiders call resilience is, in fact, the absence of alternatives – imposed scarcity rather than chosen strength.
Kevin Jared Hosein’s story Continuity which won third place in a very tight competition, frames cultural identity and belonging as sacred yet precarious, threatened not only by catastrophe but by the managerial impulse that promises to overwhelm it. How to escape the extractive attention of a global system that instrumentalizes value, how to dodge algorithms and harm by achieving inscrutability and preserving marginal ways of life are some of the concerns in this innovative work of speculative fiction.
Many thanks to reviewers Soni Brown, Lue Palmer, Cherie Jones, Kim Williams-Pulfer and Stephanie Koathes for their expert assistance with selecting the fiction for this issue.
Our poetry editors Loretta Collins Klobah and Nadi Edwards waded through 64 poetry submissions to arrive at the ones finally published. According to them second-place winner Georgio Russell “balances documentary weight with lyrical grace, grounding regional experience in existential reach,” in Through Babylon and Other Poems while his “Blue Season turns hurricane survival into a domestic epic of candlelit corridors and redemptive song.” Sonia Farmer’s Three Poetic Studies From “A Count” “is a standout for its bold formal ambition: through erasure and collage, it transforms a historical account of the 1932 Great Abaco Hurricane into lyric poetry that preserves the original event’s violence while reimagining it across the page.”
Anansi Bruk it Up: An Epic by Emily Zobel Marshall is “a daring, subversive reinvention of Anansi as queer, obscene, absurd, dangerous, comic, and enmeshed in language as both storyteller and story” while Rolando Albert’s On Becoming a Storm: Three Poems After Melissa “deftly synthesises the catastrophic imagery of hurricane Melissa with transgressively queer bodies to interrogate Jamaican religious culture and institutional violence.” (All quotes are from the review notes of our poetry editors)
As noted, several poets approached the theme of precarity and vulnerability through the disastrous hurricanes the Caribbean has experienced in recent years. Hurricanes function not only as backdrop but as a way of showing how disasters reproduce and magnify existing inequalities. Alongside survival and lyric memory, the poems morph disaster imagery into examinations of domestic life, history’s violence, religious institutions, and queer embodiment – suggesting that climate events operate socially as accelerants of vulnerability, not neutral “acts of nature.”
Creative Nonfiction has traditionally been the weakest section in PREE, with Caribbean writers showing a marked preference for poetry and fiction. In PREE 15, however, it is a nonfiction essay that won first place with the only other nonfiction essay in the issue winning an honourable mention.
Our first-placed author, Chidera Udochukwu-Nduka, is Nigeria-born, and speaks eloquently of the complex rhythms governing the existence of those who make their lives in the diaspora. Through the metaphor of spirals and spiralling in Nothing Moves in Straight Lines she connects the shores of her personal journey – from Port Harcourt in Nigeria to Toronto in Canada to Port-au-Prince in Haiti and the water that fluidly connects everything and everyone.
“My father was right. Nothing moves in straight lines. Not water, time, people, stories, grief, healing, or homecoming. Spiralism taught me to stop trying to force linearity onto my life and stop apologizing for not having a clear trajectory from there to here, from then to now.”
in The Price of a Full Gele Faith Egwuchukwu ponders the cost of being women who must risk their own lives to bring forth life “What does it cost to feel like “enough” in a world that only counts you when you are carrying, when you are labouring, when you are breaking?”
Remarkably both essays are by Nigerian women and like the stories by Nigerian writers in the fiction section they point to more complex strategies of storytelling, of writing contemporary, present-day stories without an overreliance on mythological, folkloric or nostalgic narrative modes. Another notable difference is in the agency of the subjects of these stories. In many of the stories traditionally published in PREE the central character often appears hapless or defenceless in the face of threats from large external entities, hostile nature or neighbouring hegemons whereas the protagonists of the African-authored stories mobilize their scarce resources and attempt to resolve their crises with as much derring do, pluck and nerve as they can muster.
Two other pieces to note are Siempre Vuelvo… I Always Return, a meditation on the work of Afro-Cuban artist Belkis Ayón by Rio de Janeiro-based artist Monica Maria Garabito and The Arrival and Other Poems by the winner of the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, Jamir Nazir.
PREE 15 expands our centre without losing our compass. Our widened embrace — Global South voices alongside Caribbean ones — affirms that the stories we publish are not confined by geography. Across borders and genres, writers in the Global South return to questions of equity and social justice — showing us how power hides inside policy, how vulnerability is managed, how recourse is rationed. And then, almost against the grain, the stories glow with possibility: hope as practice, hope as listening, hope as the courage to name what hurts and still imagine what can change.
PREE 15 also argues, quietly and insistently, that storytelling can be social action. From Caribbean voices to writers beyond the Caribbean, the issue insists that social justice is not only fought for in streets and offices; it is also carried in the words we write—by refusing false labels, challenging imposed narratives, and imagining different futures.
This issue asks to be read like a map — and like a warning too, from the classic canary in the coal mine (yes, we are running out of oxygen and so will you, soon). It gathers voices beyond our region, yet bound by shared questions of fairness and justice: who is protected, who is punished, who is believed, who is left to weather the storm of someone else’s decisions. And beneath the starkness, there is an undertow of hope. PREE 15 suggests that solidarity travels well — that to tell the truth together is already a beginning.
Annie Paul
Kingston, Jamaica
