The BCLF Caribbean Fiction Writers Competition is here, and there's an added incentive for Caribbean Nationals!

This year, we have added a new award for the best short fiction in a separate category exclusively for writers who live in the Caribbean.

The BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean will be awarded to the best fictive short story by a writer from the Caribbean. Our foundation prize, the BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writer's Prize category is still in effect for unpublished entrants residing in the North-American diaspora.  

Our Caribbean Fiction Writers Competition is aimed at empowering a new generation of writers in the diaspora to flood the current literary landscape. We are excited to see the Caribbean presence expand with stories told with the distinctive accent and ring of Caribbean voices: unfettered, unbound and authentic.

It is open to all writers of short fiction with Caribbean roots. 

Our competition embraces writers who have not yet gone mainstream, to tackle Caribbean-centric issues, themes and topics written with a sharpened sensibility thereby rendering each work with an aesthetic that can be described as undeniably ‘Caribbean’. We desire works written with candor, unconcerned and unfettered by the oft judgmental, alien gaze.

We strongly encourage to examine notions and ideas of identity, Home, place and belonging and to give it fresh, new meaning just as Caribbean people in the diaspora have been doing for decades. Justifiably, our 2020 theme is ‘National Language: Prose, Poetry and Sound’.

Writers for the diaspora award (BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers Prize) must not have previously published any works.

The regional award (BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean) is exclusively open to unpublished and published writers who live in the Caribbean. 

The best story in each category will be awarded a prize in the name of the highly decorated writer and academic, Dr. Elizabeth Nunez.

The BCLF is solely dedicated to enthusiastically lauding the efforts and talent of writers of short stories whose voices have yet to be heard. There are no theme or genre restrictions. Copyright remains the property of the Author.