Bocas Book Bulletin: September 2021

A monthly roundup of Caribbean literary news, curated by the NGC Bocas Lit Fest and published in the Sunday Express.

New Releases

Waiting for the Waters to Rise (World Editions), the latest novel by Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé to be translated into English, is a devastating exploration of individual and collective loss. Babakar Traoré, an obstetrician born in Mali and living in Guadeloupe, is haunted by memories of his mother and his former loves. When his solitude is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of a baby girl, he travels to Haiti in search of her family, and is forced to confront deeply personal but also political questions about ancestry, migration, exile, and the human need for a sense of purpose.

Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen (Wilfred Laurier University Press) is a long overdue summation of the work of the Jamaica-born dub poet, considered “one of the leading creative Black feminist voices in Canada.” The volume brings together selected poems from across Allen’s career, including previously unpublished work, with an introduction by editor Ronald Cummings that investigates the dynamics of her poems as they move between spoken and written forms, and their fresh resonance for the Black Lives Matter movement.

Can You Sign My Tentacle? (Interstellar Flight Press) is a genre-flipping chapbook of “horror poems” by Trinidadian Brandon O’Brien. The collection “explores the monsters we know and the ones that hide behind racism, sexism, and violence,” writes the publisher, “resulting in poems that are both comic and cosmic.”

Awards & Prizes

Nominees for the 2021 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Awards were announced on 18 August. The fiction nominees include the novels Book of the Little Axe by Lauren Francis-Sharma and Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark, both US-born writers of Trinidadian parentage. Winners will be announced at a ceremony on 15 October. Named for the US writers Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, the annual awards, launched in 2001, recognise “outstanding Black writers in the United States and across the diaspora.”

The Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival has announced the winners of its two annual short fiction competitions. Trinidadian-American Patrice Grell Yursik is the winner of the 2021 BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize, and Trinidadian Akhim Alexis is the winner of the BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean.

The 2022 Commonwealth Short Story Prize opened for submissions on 1 September, 2021. Any citizen of a Commonwealth country aged 18 or over is eligible to enter. There are prizes for regional winners — including one from the Caribbean — and the overall winner, to be announced in mid 2022. For entry guidelines, visit www.commonwealthwriters.org/shortstoryprize/info.

The new NGC Bocas Youth Writer Award was launched in August at the first-ever NGC Bocas Youth Fest. This new award, to be given annually, will recognise the most influential young person (age 25 or under) in literary arts in Trinidad and Tobago during the past year. Youth writers in any genre are eligible, including poetry, playwriting, fiction, creative non-fiction, journalism, scriptwriting, spoken word, blog writing, and song lyrics. The winner will receive a cash prize of TT$5,000. The deadline for nominations is 19 October, 2021, and the winner will be announced in December. For guidelines and the online nomination form, visit www.bocaslitfest.com/youth/writeraward.

Following two televised semi-final rounds, the finalists for the 2021 First Citizens National Poetry Slam were announced on 3 September. In alphabetical order, they are: Terriq Betaudier, Terryl Betaudier, Renaldo Briggs, Zakiya Gill, Abdul Majeed Abdal Karim, Michael Logie, Ronaldo Mohammed, Derron Sandy, Shivana Sharma, and Seth Sylvester. They will be joined in the finals by the defending champion, 2020 winner Alexandra Stewart. The slam finals will be televised on 10 October, 2021, on TTT, and streamed online via the station’s social media.

Also announced in the past week were the winners of the 2021 Dragonzilla’s Short Story Writing Challenge, organised by the NGC Children’s Bocas Lit Fest in partnership with NALIS and Tobago Library Services. This competition for young writers is awarded in two age groups. In the first round, over 100 children entered short stories on the theme “My COVID experience in Trinidad and Tobago”. Twenty-one finalists, chosen by an expert panel of educators, librarians, and storytellers, then recorded videos of themselves reading the stories for final judging. The winners were:

Age group 5 to 8 years old

1st place: David Ryan (8)

2nd place: Savion McIntosh (7)

3rd place: Nia Seerattansingh (6)

Age group 9 to 12 years old

1st place: Josh Hansraj (9)

2nd place: Zayne Martin (10)

3rd place: Ashmita Ramoutar (11)

In Memoriam

The Jamaican poet Jean “Binta” Breeze died on 4 August, 2021, at the age of 65. Recognised as the first woman to perform dub poetry, author of eight books, she was also a storyteller, actor, and theatre director. Based for many years in Britain, she toured widely performing her work, and was a major influence on a generation of younger writers in performers. She later returned to Jamaica, where she received several awards for her literary work.

Caribbean Bestsellers

Independent bookshop Paper Based (paperbased.org) shares its top-selling Caribbean titles for the past month:

Fortune, by Amanda Smyth
Pleasantview, by Celeste Mohammed
Love After Love, by Ingrid Persaud
Sweethand, by N.G. Peltier
Where There Are Monsters, by Breanne Mc Ivor

Other News

A new season of the popular Bios & Bookmarks author interview series, hosted by the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, opens today, Sunday 5 September, and runs weekly until 10 October. With the theme “Telling complex family stories”, the series offers in-depth conversations with authors of recent books of all genres. The season opens with Guyanese-American writer Rajiv Mohabir discussing his new memoir Antiman, with later episodes featuring authors Arisa White, Celeste Mohammed, Maisy Card (winner of the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Fiction), and Lawrence Scott. Bios & Bookmarks episodes are streamed on Facebook Live via the NGC Bocas Lit Fest page.

The NGC Bocas Lit Fest also continues its monthly workshop series in September, with a free online workshop on scriptwriting, with a focus on writing for theatre, led by David Edgecombe, a lecturer at the University of the Virgin Islands. Registration details and a schedule of other workshops for 2021 are online at www.bocaslitfest.com/workshops.

The 2021 Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival will run from 10 to 12 September, once more in a virtual online format. With the theme “A tapestry of words and worlds”, the programme aims “to explore the connections, ties, and bonds between ancestral lands and the diaspora communities that have been birthed.” Participants include an array of Caribbean and diaspora writers, such as Canisia Lubrin (winner of the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature), Shani Mootoo, Tiphanie Yanique, Mervyn Taylor, Tanya Shirley, and Lisa Allen-Agostini, among others. For details of the programme, visit www.bklyncbeanlitfest.com/2021-virtual-festival.