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For anyone who has ever moved to Cyprus for love and slowly realized the island had become home, Erini Loucaides’ award-winning story may feel deeply familiar.
The Australian-Cypriot writer has won the 2026 Minds Shine Bright Places Writing Prize for Relentlessly Prismatic, a short story set in Cyprus and told through the final, dreamlike moments of a woman’s life.
The story follows Sara, an Englishwoman who leaves London after marrying Giannis and settles on the island. She describes herself as a “romantic immigrant”—someone who did not come for work, weather or tax advantages, but because she fell in love.
Over time, Sara embraces Cyprus and finds that Cyprus embraces her back.
It is an experience shared by many people who arrived expecting to build a life with one person, only to form a much wider relationship with the island itself—its light, food, language, contradictions and habit of eventually making outsiders feel that they belong.
But Relentlessly Prismatic is not simply a sunny Mediterranean love story.
Half unfolds inside Sara’s morphine-altered consciousness as she faces terminal cancer, moving through a private world of memories, secrets and shifting images. The other half is narrated by Giannis, who sits beside her in a hospice and watches the woman he loves slowly slip away.
That split perspective allows the story to explore two very different versions of the same goodbye: the vivid inner life of the person dying and the helpless waiting of the person left beside them.
Loucaides’ work was selected from hundreds of international entries and named the overall winner across poetry, microfiction and short story categories.
The win is also another international moment for Cyprus, not through politics, tourism or sport, but through a story that treats the island as something more complicated than a postcard backdrop.
Loucaides grew up in Australia after her parents lost their home during the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Her writing frequently explores identity, displacement and the lives of Cypriots abroad.
She now lives in Cyprus and works as an English teacher. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of London and is working on a collection of short stories examining the island’s post-1974 “light and shadow” and its effect on people living here and across the Cypriot diaspora.
Her prose and poetry have appeared in Mslexia’s Best Women’s Fiction, the London Independent and the Bournemouth Anthology. Her work has also been translated into Estonian.
Loucaides has previously been recognized by competitions including the Bridport Prize, Commonwealth Short Story Prize, Women on Writing and Fish Short Story Prize. She is an Oxbelly Fiction Fellow and took part in a Commonwealth mentorship program under award-winning writer Jennifer Makumbi.
Other winners in the Places competition included Riley Yau of Vancouver for microfiction, Sarah-Kate Simmons of New Zealand for short story and Jennifer Seohyun Yang of Seoul for poetry.
The first English as a Second Language Prize went to Mauritius writer Sanjeevani Canakiah for The Litchi Tree.
The winners were celebrated during two online awards events held over the weekend. Their work, together with that of the shortlisted writers, will appear in the Places Anthology, scheduled for release in November.
