Reader’s Round-up
Welcome to the latest installment of the Bocas Book Bulletin, a monthly round-up 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
A Fierce Green Place: New and Selected Poems (New Directions) by Pamela Mordecai brings together poems from the Canada-based Jamaican writer’s seven previous books, plus a selection of new poems and little-known early works, with a generous afterword by poet Tanya Shirley.
Mordecai’s poems – which tackle issues of family and ancestry, mental illness and social violence, religious belief and the creative power of women – draw deeply on Jamaican Creole and culture, but have not yet received the critical attention they deserve, Shirley argues. This careersumming and often subversive volume makes it clear she is one of the outstanding voices in the Caribbean poetic canon.
Wild Fires (Borough Press), the debut novel by Trinidad-born Sophie Jai, explores memory, secrets, and grief through a family story that ranges between Trinidad and Toronto. Summoned back to her immigrant family’s home after the death of a cousin, Cassandra is plunged into a web of tensions and silences ‘where sooner or later every secret, unspoken word and painful memory will find its way out into the open’.
I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys (William Collins), a new biography by Miranda Seymour, is a vivid portrait of the brilliant, troubled, Dominican writer. Drawing on surviving letters and other documents, and on Rhys’s often autobiographical fiction to fill the many gaps, Seymour portrays Rhys’s talent, ambition, and tenacity as well as her vulnerability and self-centredness balancing honestly with compassion, tragedy with humour, and above all showing how memories of her early years in Dominica haunted all of Rhys’s writing.
Adrian Cola Rienzi: The Life and Times of an Indo-Caribbean Progressive (Royards) by eminent historian Brinsley Samaroo offers a thoroughly researched account of a key figure in Trinidad and Tobago’s political development. Born in 1905, Krishna Deonarine – who renamed himself when he left Trinidad to study law in Ireland – was at different stages of his career an anti-imperial activist, trade union leader, mayor of San Fernando, and member of T& T’s pre-Independence Legislative Council. Dedicated to advancing the rights of working people and Indo-Trinidadians, Rienzi’s achievements included the recognition of Hindu and Muslim marriages, the right to cremation, and the establishment of non-Christian religious schools.
Buyers Beware: Insurgency and Consumption in Caribbean Popular Culture (Rutgers University Press) by USbased Trinidadian scholar Patricia Joan Saunders examines phenomena such as dancehall culture and ‘sistah lit’ which ‘proudly jettison any aspirations towards middle-class respectability.’The book asks ‘how their ‘pulp’
preoccupation with contemporary fashion, music, sex, fast food, and television, is instructive for how race, class, gender, sexuality, and national politics are constructed, performed, interpreted, disseminated, and consumed from within the Caribbean.’
Awards and Prizes
Three Caribbean authors have been shortlisted for the UK Society of Authors’ 2022 awards, which recognise writers at different career stages. Pleasantview, the debut book by Trinidadian Celeste Mohammed – overall winner of the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature – is shortlisted for the McKitterick Prize, awarded annually to a first novel by an author over 40, while the novel The Snow Line by Guyana-born Tessa McWatt is shortlisted for the Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize, awarded to a UK or Irish author, or an author resident in those countries, for a novel focusing on the experience of travel.
Jamaican Roland Watson-Grant is shortlisted for the ALCS Tom Gallon Trust Award, awarded for a short story.
Celeste Mohammed’s Pleasantview has also been shortlisted for the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction. Presented annually by the US-based Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, the annual Firecracker Awards ‘celebrate books and magazines that make a significant contribution to our literary culture and the publishers that strive to introduce important voices to readers far and wide’.
Winners will be announced on June 23.
The essay collection Things I Have Withheld by Jamaican Kei Miller – already the winner of the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for non-fiction – has been named a finalist for the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, given annually for ‘writing and reporting which best meets the spirit of George Orwell’s own ambition ‘to make political writing into an art”. The winner will be announced on 14 July.
Two Caribbean writers have been named regional winners of the 2022 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and finalists for the overall award. Jamaican Diana McCaulay is the Caribbean regional winner, for her story ‘Bridge over the Yallahs River’ – having previously been named regional winner in 2012 – and Cecil Browne, born in St Vincent and the Grenadines but based in Britain, is the regional winner for Canada and Europe, with his story ‘A Hat for Lemer’. The overall winner will be announced on 21 June.
The 2022 Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival Short Fiction Contest opened for entries on 1 May, with a deadline of 1 July, 2022.
Prizes will be awarded in two categories, one for writers based in the Caribbean and the other for Caribbean authors living in the United States. Each winner will receive a cash award of US$1,750.
Other news
Running across three weekends from 11 to 25 June, Storyroom: A Three-Part Workshop in Writing for Children is the latest in the Bocas Lit Fest’s ongoing series of writer development programmes.
