Ethan Knowles
Ethan Knowles is a Bahamian writer. He was selected to participate in the 2019 Fresh Milk Writing Residency in Barbados and was the 2022 resident writer for Caribbean Linked VI in Aruba. He currently works as a speechwriter and researcher at the Office of the Prime Minister of The Bahamas. His writing has been featured in publications across Europe, North America, and the Caribbean.
The Brooklyn Rail is proud to partner with The Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival to present the winners of the 2023 BCLF Short Fiction Contests. This year is particularly special as it marks Festival 5, the BCLF's fifth anniversary or in their own words, “5 years of celebrating Caribbean writers in the North American diaspora and across the 5 boroughs of New York.” Each year, the Festival awards two short fiction prizes, one to a writer of Caribbean heritage living in the United States or Canada and the other to a writer currently living in the Caribbean–both are named after renowned Trinidadian writer and BCLF patron, Elizabeth Nunez. According to the BCLF, “Both prizes are meant to enhance writers' visibility and consequently grow their access to larger literary networks and resources for writers of Caribbean descent.” The winner of this year's BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean is Bahamian writer Ethan Knowles, for his short story “Sponger Money.” American-born, Dominica-raised writer Jade Leatham is the winner of this year's BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writer’s Prize for her short story, “Jungle Siren.”
