We are pleased to announce the opening of the 2026 BCLF Short Fiction Story in two categories (Diaspora & Regional) under the theme ‘What Cannot Be Done Alone’. This year’s theme is an invitation for writers to explore the relationships, tensions, and collaborations that shape Caribbean lives across economies, generations, geographies, and imagined worlds.

What Cannot Be Done Alone as practice and theme is the radical insistence that has underpinned the embodied Caribbean experience carried by those who arrived by ways not of their own choosing to those who came seeking adventure and control. It speaks to the narrative arc of communal partnership and the defiant will within developing communities to rely on the power of collective action. It is the instinct to coalesce as opposed to the easier, more insidious call to fragmentation. 

What Cannot Be Done Alone is also the disavowal of inherited answers in favour of embracing the uncertainty of the unknown. It is the mapping of how we were set adrift, our mechanisms of return through grief, learned trust, ingenuity, joy and the sacred ritual of wisdoms and knowledge. 

This year, our contest is as much a call for the stories that examine shared survival, contested belonging, inheritance and repair as it is for the stories that interrogate what happens to our existence under the influence of unforeseen consequences of connection. Writers are encouraged to consider how lives intersect and how futures are shaped through relation rather than isolation.

All writers must also submit a brief curatorial statement explaining how their short story responds to and embodies the theme.