A monthly roundup of news about Caribbean books and writers, presented by the Bocas Lit Fest.
New releases
The Beginning of a Journey (Peepal Tree Press) by Earl Lovelace presents poems from the renowned author’s early career, before the advent of his ceebrated and award-winning novels. Gathered from archival materials housed at The University of the West Indies, the poems in The Beginning of a Journey reveal Lovelace’s preoccupations with many of the themes that would go on to characterise his fiction, chief among them our nation’s self-determination from the spectres of colonialism. Other themes explored in these verses include romantic love, the progress of time, and a veneration of the natural landscape.
The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive (New Directions) by Marcia Douglas takes its reader through a nonlinear journey traversing 18th century Jamaica and 2010s America. The novel’s cast of characters, disparate in their origins, search for objects, people, and possibilities lost to them through fate or oppressive circumstances. What emerges is a complex and fascinating portrait of Jamaican life across three centuries, as told by runaway slaves, migrant seamstresses, and supplementary figures whose voices are no less resonant. The publication of this work continues Douglas’s development of her ambitious “speculative ancestral project”.
My Own Dear People (Akashic Books) by Dwight Thompson centres around a young Jamaican man’s progress in shedding the skin of societally imposed masculinity, discovering what he truly stands for in the process. Witness to a horrific on-campus assault, Nyjah Messado seeks to make amends for the actions of its violent perpetrators, but cannot quite absolve himself of his role as a bystander. Thompson’s novel is an intense, often confronting examination of personal guilt, contrasted against the pressures of a machismo that keeps secrets well-hidden. My Own Dear People is the author’s second novel, following Death Register.
A Quiet Disappearance (Mawenzi House) by Rabindranath Maharaj assembles short stories whose central characters are preoccupied with the relentless onward march of time. Containing as its epigraph a brief quote from Virginia Woolf that says, “I should like to tidy things up and disappear,” each story in the collection delves deep into the inner lives of its men and women, as they try to reconcile themselves to a rapidly shifting world. The title story reveals a son’s fragmentary relationship with a father succumbing to illness, conveyed in unsentimental prose that yet reveals a deep, abiding heartache.
Look at You (Peepal Tree Press) by Amanda Smyth heralds the author’s latest novel as a narrative, symbolic descendant of Jean Rhys, according to Ali Smith. Bringing us the life of a young girl as she moves from childhood to her adult years, Smyth shows the inner complications and vicissitudes that make an identity marked by separations and exiles. Shifting between locales in England and Trinidad, Look at You is an intimate exploration of the self, told in unsparing prose. Smyth’s previous novel, Fortune, was shortlisted for the 2022 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.
Awards and prizes
Myriam JA Chancy has become the first Haitian author to win the overall OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature with her novel Village Weavers (Tin House). The prize comes with a cash award of US$10,000, sponsored by One Caribbean Media (OCM) . The novel was described by the prize judges as “a compellingly ambitious and beautifully executed narrative”. Acclaimed Jamaican author Erna Brodber, chief judge for the prize, made the announcement during the award ceremony on Saturday 3 May, during this year’s Bocas Lit Fest The ceremony also honoured poetry winner Anthony Vahni Capildeo (for their book Polkadot Wounds) and nonfiction winner Dionne Brand (for her book-length essay Salvage: Readings from the Wreck).
Shaquille Warren has emerged victorious, placing first in the 2025 First Citizens National Poetry Slam, which confers a cash prize of TT$50,000. Warren, a first-time finalist, became the first poet in the competition’s history to win from the number-one performance slot, and only the fourth to win at their debut. Taking second and third place, and receiving TT$20,000 and TT$10,000, respectively, were Derron Sandy and Alicia Psyche Haynes. The First Citizens National Poetry Slam, held at the National Academy for the Performing Arts on Sunday 4 May, brought the curtain down on the 2025 Bocas Lit Fest as its official closing event.
Canisia Lubrin, overall winner of the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, was awarded the 2025 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, worth US$150,000, for her novel Code Noir. The prize judges called St Lucian-Canadian Lubrin’s book groundbreaking, saying “Canisia Lubrin’s prose is polyphonic; the stories invite you to immerse yourself in both the real and the speculative, in the intimate and in sweeping moments of history.”
Code Noir, Lubrin’s fiction debut, is composed of 59 short stories, each of which interrogates and responds to Louis XIV’s “Black Code”, which decreed rules of slavery for France and its colonies.
Four writers from the Caribbean have been shortlisted for the 2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, awarded annually for the best piece of unpublished short fiction from any of the Commonwealth’s 56 member states. They are Joanne C Hillhouse of Antigua and Barbuda, Subraj Singh of Guyana, Kellie Magnus of Jamaica, and Jessie Mayers of St Lucia. The Caribbean regional winner will be announced on 14 May, and then the judges will choose one overall winner from the five global regions, to be announced on 25 June. Regional winners receive £2,500 and the overall winner receives £5,000.
Caribbean bestsellers
Independent bookshop Paper Based (Instagram: @paperbasedbookshop) shares its top-selling Caribbean titles for the past month:
1. Writing For Our Lives, edited by Diana McCaulay and Shivanee Ramlochan
2. Ever Since We Small, by Celeste Mohammed
3. A House for Miss Pauline, by Diana McCaulay
4. Village Weavers, by Myriam J. A. Chancy
5. The Possibility of Tenderness, by Jason Allen-Paisant
