Books by fifteen authors with roots in eight countries have been shortlisted for the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, sponsored by One Caribbean Media, owner of the Trinidad and Tobago Express newspaper, TV6, and the OCM radio network
Presented annually since 2011, the OCM Bocas Prize is the most coveted award for Caribbean authors. It recognises books in three genre categories — poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction — published by authors of Caribbean birth or citizenship in the preceding year.
To commemorate the landmark 15th year of the Prize, the shortlists for the three genre categories have each been increased to five books, with a total of 15 Caribbean books in contention for the overall award. Debut books make up a strong proportion of the shortlists, with six first-time authors selected by the judges.
Poetry
The authors of the five books shortlisted for the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry include two veterans alongside three debut poets.
Polkadot Wounds by Trinidadian-Scottish Anthony Vahni Capildeo “transforms form,” say the judges. “These poems make it seem like an easy feat to hold millennia in one image and then another, moving inside of time with grace … It is in fact a miracle only made possible by bringing a depth of precision and an openness of sound together again and again.”
West of West Indian by Linzey Corridon —born in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, based in Canada — “reclaims deadly and derogatory stereotypes to create a counter archive of Caribbean LGBTQ healing,” the judges remark. “With reclamatory portraits and transformative questions, Corridon works a spell and opens a way. This collection of poems will be a life-saving and life-giving text for years to come.”
Some of Us Can Go Back Home by Jamaican Yashika Graham “is a stunning debut where the vital energy of the poetic work meets the craft of an insightful and brave voice. In Graham, we have a worthy steward of the lineage of Lorna Goodison, Olive Senior, Edward Baugh, and generations of poets who offer a loving claim and a transformational call through their precise and attentive poetic ceremonies.”
Getting Through: New and Selected Poems by US-based Trinidadian Mervyn Taylor “is a record of a lifetime of deep listening and intense observation. This collection, which gathers many years of Taylor’s impactful poems while also offering astute new poems relevant to this very moment, is a study in the practice of poetry as relation. This collection reminds us why Taylor is a poet who has already opened doors for generations.”
The fifth shortlisted poetry book — Coco Island, by UK-based Jamaican poet Christine Roseeta Walker — “reclaims Negril, not as a tourist fantasy, but as a zone of haunting magic and coming of age,” say the judges. “The characters Walker develops are real enough to walk off the page, and yet the magic of their realism means they live instead in the hearts, minds, and dreams of the reader. This book of poems creates and populates a world so fully that it almost becomes a novel in verse.”
Fiction
The five books shortlisted for the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Fiction similarly bring together three first-time authors with two already celebrated multi-genre writers.
Village Weavers by Haiti-born Myriam J.A. Chancy — “a compellingly ambitious and beautifully executed narrative,” say the judges — ranges over six decades as it explores the relationship between two women who grew up together in 1940s Port-au-Prince. “Chancy conjures the complex, enduring intensity of this friendship beautifully, confirming its importance at the very heart of the two women’s lives … Her narrative voice is quietly poetic throughout, punctuated by intensely lyrical descriptions and arresting metaphors.”
Sweet Li Jie by the veteran UK-based Guyanese writer David Dabydeen is a historical novel told through a series of letters written by a late-19th-century Chinese migrant in British Guiana, addressed to his sweetheart in Wuhan Province. “Dabydeen uses the epistolary device to great effect, to allow fascinating angles on how Guiana and its inhabitants might have appeared to a relatively well-off Chinese arrivant, bringing with him a different range of prejudices to the more familiar European ones … The writing is both poised and playful.”
The Pages of the Sea, the debut novel by Grenada-born Anne Hawk, “brings new energy and form to a familiar narrative of Caribbean childhood, that of the pain and desolation of the child left behind when a parent migrates.” Set in an unnamed island in the 1960s, it tells the story of a young girl whose mother has left for Britain in search of work. “The prose has an immediacy that matches the girl’s intensity, as well as her confusion about what secrets the adults around her appear to be hiding.”
The Believers, a collection of sometimes linked short stories by T&T-born A.K. Herman, is another debut work. “Settings range from Scarborough in Tobago to the Bronx in New York, and are described in quick, deft strokes … Herman conjures characters with equal dexterity,” say the judges. “Each story swiftly establishes its narrative arc and delivers with integrity and verve, setting the context and parameters for interpretation confidently and persuasively.”
Completing the fiction shortlist is the debut novel Sweetness in the Skin, by Jamaica-born Ishi Robinson. “The novel charts the slow, patient journey of its teenage protagonist and narrator, Pumkin, to make a life for herself despite her mother’s persistent neglect and simmering resentment … Mother, aunt, and grandmother are all compellingly brought to life in Pumkin’s telling, through vivid dialogue and a series of dramatic emotional scenes.”
Nonfiction
The books shortlisted for the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Nonfiction are highly diverse in topic and approach, tackling autobiography, family memoir, history, and cultural analysis.
Salvage: Readings from the Wreck by Trinidadian-Canadian Dionne Brand “profoundly, beautifully, and deftly changes how we read and see,” say the judges. “The many levels of writing in Salvage work to rethink the novel not just as content and representation, but as the specific engine of a certain kind of worldly knowing … Much like Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, Salvage will change forever how we read the novel and the work the novel does in the world.”
“Against a backdrop of social, political, ecological, and other upheavals,” the essay collection We’re Alone by Haitian-American Edwidge Danticat “smoothly crafts a narrative that refuses to rest in victimhood … Loss is at the heart of this book, but loss does not immobilise, rather it is the impulse for Danticat to roam from the United States to Haiti, plotting for readers the limits of our present organisation of life.”
Resistance Refuge Revival: The Indigenous Kalinagos of Dominica by Dominican anthropologist and archaeologist Lennox Honychurch is an “epic account,” say the judges, “that restores to the Caribbean a story that should be our lingua franca. This elegant and accessible story is a gift to the region, its artists, its students, its Kalinago population, and Indigenous activists throughout the Americas … We are left with the ethical imperative of centring this encounter as we go forward into the future.”
Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond by Guyanese-American Oneka LaBennett “is a groundbreaking genre-fluid work … This major contribution to Afro-Asian dialogue in the Caribbean takes seriously the specificity of Guyana, the archive, the personal, and the diasporic. It also crafts a trajectory that reminds us why the Caribbean is itself a global formation.”
The final shortlisted book of nonfiction is Mother Archive: A Dominican Family Memoir, by Erika Morillo, born in the Dominican Republic and based in the US. “Morillo’s memoir of trauma, violence, and motherhood maps her life across the Americas against a backdrop of state violence, disappearance, and the intimacy and disappointment of family. This episodic memoir tells the difficult story of mother-daughter relations against and alongside the difficult politics of representation and loss.”
In the second stage of judging for the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize, the judges will announce the winners in the three genre categories on Sunday 6 April. These will go on to compete for the overall Prize of US$10,000, to be announced on Saturday 3 May, during the 15th annual Bocas Lit Fest in Port of Spain.
The 2025 Prize is judged by a panel of distinguished Caribbean and international writers and literary professionals. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Anguillan-American author and winner of a Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry, chairs the poetry panel, joined by Canadian-British poet Alycia Pirmohamed, and Venezuelan poet and translator Adalber Salas Hernández.
The fiction panel is chaired by Guyanese-British literary scholar Denise deCaires Narain, Emeritus Reader in Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Sussex, joined by T&T writer Celeste Mohammed (herself the winner of the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize) and Trinidadian-British Fleur Sinclair, president of the UK Booksellers Association.
The chair of the non-fiction panel, Barbados-born scholar Rinaldo Walcott, is Professor and Carl V. Granger Chair in Africana and American Studies at the University of Buffalo. He is joined by Gabrielle Hosein, Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, UWI, St. Augustine, and Dominica-born writer, curator, and artist Catherine Lord.
The overall chair of the 2025 cross-genre judging panel is the celebrated Jamaican writer Erna Brodber. Her many honours include a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, a Musgrave Gold Medal from the Institute of Jamaica, and a Prince Claus Award.
OCM, First Citizens, the JB Fernandes Memorial Trust, and the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and the Arts are main sponsors of the 2025 Bocas Lit Fest; the British Council, the Windham-Campbell Prizes, Murphy-Clarke, the Massy Foundation, and The UWI are sponsors.
The 2025 Bocas Lit Fest will run from Thursday 1 to Sunday 4 May, at the National Library and Old Fire Station and other venues around Port of Spain.
The shortlists for the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize are:
Poetry
- Polkadot Wounds, by Anthony Vahni Capildeo (Carcanet)
- West of West Indian, by Linzey Corridon (Mawenzi House)
- Some of Us Can Go Back Home, by Yashika Graham (Blue Banyan)
- Getting Through: New and Selected Poems, by Mervyn Taylor (Beltway Editions)
- Coco Island, by Christine Roseeta Walker (Carcanet)
Fiction
- Village Weavers, by Myriam J.A. Chancy (Tin House)
- Sweet Li Jie, by David Dabydeen (Peepal Tree Press)
- Pages of the Sea, by Anne Hawk (Biblioasis/WeatherGlass Books)
- The Believers: Stories, by A.K. Herman (A.R. Phillips)
- Sweetness in the Skin, by Ishi Robinson (Penguin Michael Joseph)
Nonfiction
- Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, by Dionne Brand (Knopf Canada/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
- We’re Alone, by Edwidge Danticat (Graywolf Press)
- Resistance Refuge Revival: The Indigenous Kalinagos of Dominica, by Lennox Honychurch (Papillote Press)
- Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond, by Oneka LaBennett (NYU Press)
- Mother Archive: A Dominican Family Memoir, by Erika Morillo (University of Iowa Press)
