Lisa-Anne Julien has won the Africa regional prize at the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for her story “Me and Ma’am”, a devastating portrait of the relationship between a domestic worker and her employer set over the course of a single working day. The win puts her in contention for the overall prize, which will be announced in an online ceremony on 30 June, with the five regional winners’ stories to be published by Granta ahead of that announcement.

Originally from Trinidad and Tobago, Julien has lived in Johannesburg for twenty-four years, and that particular biography, Caribbean-born, Africa-rooted, pulses through the story and through her own words about it. “Having grown up in the Caribbean, I was fascinated by an imagined Africa,” she said on winning. “For the last 24 years, I have walked, danced, and cried with citizens of the real Africa. My story is written from this merger.” She is fifty-four years old, and this win, she says, “is rooted in both an ancestral sensibility and my lived experiences on such a dynamic continent.”

“Me and Ma’am” follows a keenly observant domestic worker moving through her work day, asserting herself among her peers, sidestepping the liberal guilt of her employer, until an equalising experience dissolves the barriers between the two women. The story grew, Julien has said, out of her long fascination with the people who come to work in our homes: domestic workers, nannies, carers, gardeners. “These are individuals who occupy an interesting place in our lives — family but not quite, friends but not exactly buddies,” she said. “The relationship can be terminated at a moment’s notice, leaving one to wonder what was real.”

Judging for the Africa region, South African journalist and author Fred Khumalo called it “a richly complex story that rises above all submissions from the African continent through a combination of humour, serious introspection and a deep sense of a shared humanity.” He noted that where most South African class stories are couched in race, Julien’s story goes somewhere more interesting, “it is at one level a commentary on debates about class, and how they have evolved. But it is also a story about women looking out for each other.”

Julien is not a new voice so much as one that has been building steadily toward this kind of recognition. Her novel If You Save Me won the University of Johannesburg’s 2022 Debut Prize for Fiction. Her fiction has appeared in Pree, the Caribbean literary magazine. Her writing residencies include Femrite, Yale Writers, and the Jakes Gerwel Foundation. She cites Zadie Smith’s White Teeth as the book that made her want to become a writer, which tells you about the register she is working in: expansive, funny, alive to the comedy and tragedy of people thrown together by circumstance.

The Commonwealth Short Story Prize, administered by the Commonwealth Foundation and open to writers from all 56 member countries, awards £2,500 to regional winners and £5,000 to the overall winner. Entries can be submitted in twelve languages in addition to English. The overall winner will be announced on 30 June. Congratulations to Lisa-Anne Julien!