Renesha Dhanraj wins The London Magazine Short Story Prize 2025

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The judges of The London Magazine Short Story Prize 2025 award first place to Renesha Dhanraj for her story, ‘Black Cake’, with second and third place awarded to Jordan Hayward and Jonathan Edwards, respectively.

Submissions were read anonymously by the panel of judges: Gurnaik Johal (author of We Move and Saraswati), Ben Pester (author of Am I in the Right Place? and The Expansion Project) and CAA’s Erika Price.

Winner Renesha Dhanraj is an Indo-Guyanese writer and graduate of the MFA Fiction Program at Brooklyn College. She is currently living in NYC and working on a novel about Guyanese immigrants. 

Her stories have been published in EPOCH, The Minnesota Review, Pithead Chapel, The North Meridian Review, performed at Liars’ League London and awarded Pushcart nominations. She has stories forthcoming in Prairie Schooner and with the Observatory Caribbean Migrants Project (OBMICA).

‘I am deeply honored to have my story selected and published in The London Magazine,’ she says. ‘I was inspired to write ‘Black Cake’ by the seldom-written-about race riots in Guyana and what happens when womanhood is overlaid on that kind of social violence. Congratulations to all of the winning writers!’

One of our judges, Gurnaik Johal, had the following to say on the shortlist:

The stories on this shortlist really reward rereading. While there’s a great variance in theme and style, I was struck by a shared sense of intensity and daring across the six pieces. I loved how ‘Black Cake’ and ‘I Fell In Love With My Documentary Crew’ do new things on the level of the sentence, how ‘The Cedar’ and ‘The Patron Saint of Poulton-Le-Fylde’ make the everyday feel newly strange, and how familial relationships are considered anew in ‘Release Pen’ and ‘Diversion’. All are effective and affecting – I hope we’ll be reading more from these writers soon.

As well as receiving prizes of £750, £450 and £300 respectively, the winners are to be published in the upcoming December / January 2025 issue of The London Magazine. To ensure you get a copy before it sells out, subscribe here.

The full list of winners include:

First Place: ‘Black Cake’ by Renesha Dhanraj

‘A stand-out winner,’ judge Ben Pester says. ‘Hidden inside these clipped sentences, and flicks back and forth in time, is a tragedy that creeps up and rolls you inside itself. A voice emerges gradually which by the end peals like a bell – even as it understates the entire horror of what we’ve seen. The final scene is something I will think about over and over again.’

Second Place: ‘The Patron Saint of Poulton-le-Fylde’ by Jordan Hayward

‘I’m ecstatic that this story, the premise of which my wife and I half-seriously brainstormed before bed one night, and that includes so many things I’m passionate about (various broths, the North West and the music of Daft Punk), is a prize-winner in this competition. I’m ludicrously grateful to The London Magazine, the judges and fellow shortlistees.’