Maggie Harris – författare

Honouring strong new voices from around the world, the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize is a global award, open to unpublished as well as published writers, with a truly international judging panel. This global anthology presents the winner of the 2014 Short Story Prize, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s “Let’s Tell This Story Properly,” alongside some of the most promising and original stories entered for the prize during the past three years by emerging writers across the literary landscape of the world. Gathered from over ten thousand entries, the selected stories are provocative, rich in flair and ambition, and push the boundaries of fiction into fresh territory.Sending for Chantal is by Guyana’s Maggie Harris.

Maggie Harris’ short-story collection Writing on Water is informed by voices of the Caribbean where she was born and Britain where she has lived as an adult, and through them, the wider world. These are stories of migration and survival, of children and families brought together or torn apart. Maggie writes poetry and prose and won the poetry section of the Guyana Prize for Literature 2014.

''Maggie Harris mines the hidden corners of marriage, motherhood, exile, and the places we choose to call home… Whether exploring Guyana''s junglescapes and flatlands, Irish cliffs or rural Wales, her characters arrive on the page eager to tell their stories.'' – Sharon Millar ''...bitter-sweet, beautifully written tales.'' – Janet Montefiore Maggie Harris'' short-story collection Writing on Water is told through voices from the Caribbean where she was born and Britain where she has lived as an adult, and through them, the wider world. These are stories of migration, belonging and survival, of children and families brought together or torn apart. This is a varied collection containing stories such as ''Sending for Chantal'', a story of Caribbean migration about a child who hasn''t seen her mum since she was 4 and is now in her 30s, which was the Regional Winner of The Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2014. Maggie, who lives in West Wales, writes poetry and prose and also won the poetry section of the Guyana Prize for Literature 2014.

**Winner of the Jhalak Poetry Prize 2026 ** Haunted by ghosts of colonial history, Maggie Harris’ *I Sing to the Greenhearts *challenges the dullness of the pastoral, unafraid to engage with Western art in critiquing how we view the environment. For example, ‘The Daydream, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’ reaches behind the beauty personified by the painter’s model to the reality of the wild. Writing on Pre-Raphaelite Joanna Mary Boyce’s Head of a Mulatto Woman, the black woman in the painting stands in for many resilient women – often mothers and grandmothers – that Harris finds in modern day life.Guyana’s Greenheart tree appears here as one of many plants with attitude, plants that know their history, plants bringing in the wild from the edges. They are transplants in a thriving Welsh garden, in poems such as ‘My Banana thinks on Louise Bennett’s “Colonisation in Reverse”’. Untamed nature lurks at the edges of the poems, through the disruption of migration, marriage, and re-settlement. Parakeets rehome in the UK. A lynx escapes from Ceredigion Zoo. The wild nourishes, evokes memory, reassures, and ties time and place together even as migration disturbs, upsets and challenges. I Sing to the Greenhearts presents a world where both ecological crisis and justice are at stake.