A monthly roundup of news about Caribbean books and writers, presented by the Bocas Lit Fest.
New releases
The Grand Paloma Resort (Ballantine Books) by Dominican-American Cleyvis Natera ushers its readers behind the glamorous opulence of a beachfront hotel in the Dominican Republic, and reveals the lives of the people who make that touristic behemoth run smoothly. Natera’s second novel is steeped in intrigue and good old-fashioned bacchanal, with plot points including a desperate entreaty to a local curandera, and a disappearance in the height of a Category 5 Hispaniola hurricane. Through it all, Natera’s prose deeply humanises her characters, notably the Moreno sisters, whose differences bind them in their quest to escape the seedier side of dark tourism.
How to be Unmothered (Restless Books) by Camille U Adams uses creative nonfiction to forthrightly address the taboos of maternal neglect and abuse. Adams’s memoir details, often painfully and in haunting detail, her fraught childhood and tumultuous coming of age in a household disposed to multiple forms of violence. Detailing the necessity of Adams’s migration to Brooklyn from Trinidad and Tobago, How to be Unmothered explores the ruinous, redemptive pathways that must be taken in order to not only build one’s own life, but to reclaim it. In uncompromising narrative style, the memoir confronts multiple spectres of shame rattling in Caribbean closets.
Putting Myself Together (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Antiguan-American Jamaica Kincaid gathers selected nonfiction writings from the acclaimed author, spanning 1974 to the present day. What emerges is a nuanced, frank and often disarming portrait of Kincaid in her own language and on her own terms, whether she speaks of her move to New York at the age of 16, or of her historically-rooted preoccupation with gardening, which began in the 1990s. These essays are well-positioned to reach longtime devotees of Kincaid’s sharp and unrelenting prose. They are also presented with generous context to entice new readers to her remarkable body of work.
The Quiet Ear (Hogarth/Weidenfeld and Nicholson) by Raymond Antrobus maps and documents the author’s life in deafness, reframing that reality not as a detriment, but as an aid. Antrobus, of English and Jamaican parentage, details his diagnosis of deafness at the age of four, and the frequent societal disbelief—or worse, scorn—in which his condition was held. Chronicling the decline of deaf education in British school systems, Antrobus simultaneously shows how his own deafness resides alongside, and influences, his positions on race, masculinity, class and creative work. Accounts of prominent D/deaf cultural figures, from poets to actors to painters, also pervade the memoir.
Fugitive Tilts (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Ishion Hutchinson is the Jamaican poet’s debut book of essays, composed in a tone at once meditative and expansive, as Hutchinson muses on history, race, travel, and his life in reading. The sea, as ancestral repository and pervasive metaphor, reoccurs in several of the essays—as cautionary tale, as indictment, and as a renewing, complicated promise. From Jamaica to Senegal, Hutchinson’s global sojourns bear significantly on the framing of Fugitive Tilts, which share how an identity is made from a series of patterns, ones shaped by empire, privilege (or the lack thereof), decolonial frameworks, and positions towards power.
Writing For Our Lives at The Writers Centre
Writing For Our Lives, an anthology of climate justice featuring 18 established and emerging writers from eight Caribbean territories, will be celebrated at The Writers Centre on Saturday, September 13, at 5.30 pm. Three of the anthology’s T&T contributors —Amanda T McIntyre, Portia Subran, and Judy Raymond—will read from their pieces in Writing For Our Lives, then join Omar Mohammed, author of the anthology’s afterword and former CEO of The Cropper Foundation, for a wide-ranging discussion.
Writing For Our Lives, commissioned by The Cropper Foundation and published by Peekash Press, is co-edited by Jamaican novelist and environmentalist Diana McCaulay and Trinidadian poet and essayist Shivanee Ramlochan.
Paper Based Bookshop will have copies of the anthology for sale on Saturday, September 13, and Sleepy Cat Cafe will be open with hot and cold drinks and pastries for sale.
This event is free and open to the public; all are welcome.
2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize open for entries
The 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize is now open for entries. Any citizen of a Commonwealth country is eligible to enter, with an original piece of unpublished short fiction, from 2,000 to 5,000 words in length. The judging process is defined by Commonwealth Foundation Creatives as follows: “An international judging panel will select a shortlist of around 25 stories, from which five regional winners are chosen. One of the regional winners is then selected as the overall winner, who receives £5,000. The regional winners will receive £2,500. All five regional winning stories will be published on Granta.”
Past overall winners of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize who hail from the Caribbean include Kwame McPherson (2023), Kevin Jared Hosein (2018), and Ingrid Persaud (2017).
Entries close on November 1. To submit an entry and for further information, visit https://commonwealthfoundation.com/short-story-prize/.
Other Awards and Prizes
Ibis, the debut novel by T&T-born, US-based writer Justin Haynes, has been longlisted for the 2025 Centre for Fiction First Novel Prize. Presented annually by The Centre for Fiction, a literary NGO in New York City, the prize is given to a debut novel published in the United States, and comes with a cash award of US$15,000. The winner will be announced in December.
US-based St Lucian writer Catherine-Esther Cowie has been shortlisted for the 2025 Forward Prizes, in the Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection category. She joins four other writers in that lineup, including Isabelle Baafi, of Jamaican and South African descent. Cowie’s debut collection of poems, Heirloom (Carcanet Press), maps generations of St Lucian women’s stories in poems, across the colonial and postcolonial history of that island. The winner of the Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection will receive £5,000.
Further Caribbean representation in the 2025 Forward Prizes shortlists is noted in the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem—Performed shortlist, where Raymond Antrobus is nominated for his piece ‘Dynamic Disks’, 1933. The winner of The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem—Performed will receive £1,000.
Overall winners of the Forward Prizes will be announced as part of the London Literature Festival on Sunday 26 October.
Caribbean bestsellers
1. Mixing Memory and Desire: How History Shaped the Foods of the Caribbean, by Lee Johnson
2. Love Forms, by Claire Adam
3. Palmyra, by Karen Barrow
4. The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh, by Ingrid Persaud
5. Look At You, by Amanda Smyth
