A memoir by Jamaican author Safiya Sinclair has won the award for outstanding Caribbean book of the past year. How to Say Babylon is the winner of the overall 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, which comes with a cash award of US$10,000, sponsored by One Caribbean Media. Published in the UK by Fourth […] The post Jamaican Safiya Sinclair wins OCM Bocas Prize appeared first on Bocas Lit Fest ..read more

Monique Roffey, Trinidadian-British author and winner of the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, will sign copies of her newest novel, Passiontide, on Friday 28 June, from 3:30 to 5:30 pm at The Writers Centre, one day after the book’s United Kingdom release date.  Passiontide, published by Harvill Secker (Penguin) in the UK on 27 June, is Roffey’s first novel since The Mermaid of Black Conch, which won the 2021 Costa Book of the Year Award and has been translated into 16 languages. Inspired by the 2016 murder of Japanese pan player Asami Nagakiya, Passiontide follows the inter ..read more

Welcome to the latest installment of the Bocas Book Bulletin, a monthly roundup of Caribbean literary news, curated by the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, Trinidad and Tobago’s annual literary festival, and published in the Sunday Express. New Releases It Waits in the Forest (Rick Riordan Presents) by Sarah Dass is a young adult thriller with Caribbean folkloric roots, set in a tiny island called St. Virgil. Dass, based in Tobago, creates in Selina DaSilva a central character more convinced by tangible natural science than superstition. It Waits in the Forest explores the entanglements of grief with the p ..read more

Welcome to the latest installment of the Bocas Book Bulletin, a monthly roundup of Caribbean literary news, curated by the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, Trinidad and Tobago’s annual literary festival, and published in the Sunday Express. New Releases Village Weavers (Tin House), by Haitian-Canadian-American Myriam J.A. Chancy, intertwines the lives and fates of two diametrically opposed girls, Gertrude and Sisi, beginning in 1940s Port-au-Prince and wending through their growth into adulthood. When their separate yet enmeshed journeys reconnect some six decades later, the narrative reveals several shock ..read more

On Sunday, April 28, Queen’s Hall will be ablaze with high-powered poetry performances for the 2024 First Citizens National Poetry Slam. A pool of 80 auditionees was whittled down to 16 through semifinal rounds at the Central Bank Auditorium on March 23 and 24, all vying for the coveted title of Grand Slam Champion. The event will bring the curtains down on the 14th annual NGC Bocas Lit Fest, which will run from April 25 to 28. This year marks the 12th edition of the First Citizens National Poetry Slam, the Caribbean’s biggest spoken word championship. The stakes are high, with $80,000 up for ..read more

There is a week in October each year when a particular subset of readers — Caribbean or otherwise — hold their breaths hoping to hear a particular writer’s name. The reason is the annual announcement of the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the writer is Dionne Brand, who many readers and scholars consider a leading contender for the award. Over the past four and a half decades, since her publishing debut in 1978, Dionne Brand has amassed a body of writing — in poetry and prose, fiction and essay, and hybrid genres — rivalling that of any other living writer, in its intellectual dep ..read more

A stellar array of acclaimed authors will be in the lineup at the 2024 NGC Bocas Lit Fest, alongside debut and budding writers of all genres. Trinidad and Tobago’s annual festival of books and writers, which is also the Anglophone Caribbean’s biggest annual literary event, launched its upcoming programme today. Running from Thursday 25 to Sunday 28 April, the festival — now in its 14th year — includes over 150 authors, speakers, and performers, in a packed schedule of events. Once again, the festival will be based at the National Library in downtown Port of Spain, with satellite venues around ..read more

Milestone anniversaries of two groundbreaking Caribbean novels are among the highlights of the upcoming 2024 NGC Bocas Lit Fest, with special events on the first two nights of the annual festival. Spirits in the Dark, the debut novel by Vincentian-Canadian writer H. Nigel Thomas, will be in the spotlight on Thursday 25 April, as the festival celebrates the book’s 30th anniversary. The session, which is free and open to the public, will feature the author in conversation with writer and scholar Angelique V. Nixon at The Writers Centre, 14 Alcazar Street, St. Clair, from 7 pm. Described as “a pi ..read more

“What we think of as unimaginable is simply real life for others, both far away and on our very doorstep,” says Karen Lord. The Barbadian author, whose latest novel The Blue, Beautiful World was recently longlisted for The Women’s Prize for Fiction, will be part of a special lineup of events at the 2024 NGC Bocas Lit Fest, focused on speculative fiction and fantasy (SFF). Dubbed Fantastic Friday — running all day on Friday 26 April — the series explores how contemporary authors use these genres set in other worlds and other times to tackle burning issues of the here and now. Other authors in t ..read more

In May 2022, when Geetanjali Shree’s novel Tomb of Sand was named the winner of that year’s International Booker Prize, it made history. It was the first novel written in a South Asian language to win the prestigious award, and Shree was the first writer from India to take home the accolade —sibling to the longer-established Booker Prize, for which only English-language books are eligible. For Shree, it was a moment of life-changing global recognition after a long and fruitful writing career, and not just for the £50,000 award (shared with translator Daisy Rockwell). For contemporary Indian li ..read more