Two prizewinning authors from Trinidad and Tobago recently claimed the spotlight at international literary festivals in Colombia and Kenya.
Novelists Celeste Mohammed — winner of the 2022 overall OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature — and Kevin Jared Hosein — winner of the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Fiction and the 2024 Sir Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction — were among the headliners at the Feria Insular del Libro de San Andrés, Providencia y Santa Catalina (FILSAI) and the Macondo Literary Festival, respectively.
2025 is the second year that T&T authors have had pride of place at FILSAI, an annual literary festival and book fair based in San Andrés, a Caribbean territory that forms a department of Colombia. With the theme “Aal a wi”/”Todos nosotros”, FILSAI ran from 17 to 21 September. Mohammed — whose second novel, Ever Since We Small, was launched last May at the Bocas Lit Fest — participated in several multilingual readings and discussions, in a programme reflecting the Caribbean’s linguistic diversity.
Mohammed was joined at FILSAI 2025 by Melvina Hazard, children’s programme manager at the Bocas Lit Fest and herself a writer. Hazard led two storytelling workshops for primary school students, modelled on the Bocas Lit Fest’s long-established Children’s Storytelling Caravan, and participated in other book fair panels and readings. She was accompanied by Dragonzelda “Zelly” Bocas, the Bocas Lit Fest puppet mascot, who helped explain the developmental work of the T&T festival’s children’s programme.
“Attending FILSAI 2025 was an affirming experience,” says Mohammed. “Literature is one of the ways we revisit our shared history and wrestle with the questions that shape our present, so becoming intimate with each other’s stories is a powerful means of reconnecting. The festival’s theme — ‘Aal a wi’ (All of us) — was brought to life with passion and generosity by our hosts, and it reminded me how much more we Caribbean people have in common than we have apart. Exchanges like these forge important literary partnerships and ensure that our Caribbean voices continue to resonate across the region and the wider world.”
Mohammed and Hazard’s participation in FILSAI was supported by the Centro Cultural of the Banco de la Republica de Colombia, and is part of a long-term, multiyear exchange which brought a delegation from San Andrés to the 2024 Bocas Lit Fest in Port of Spain, followed by the recognition of T&T as special guest country at FILSAI 2024.
Meanwhile, thousands of miles to the east and on another continent, the 2025 Macondo Literary Festival ran from 19 to 21 September in Nairobi, Kenya, with a special Caribbean focus. Kevin Jared Hosein — one of the most acclaimed of T&T’s new generation of writers — was joined in the programme by Karen Lord of Barbados and Jamaican-American Marcia Douglas. All three authors are familiar to many T&T readers, having each appeared several times on the Bocas Lit Fest stage.
Hosein participated in three separate festival sessions, joining panels of writers to discuss topics such as the influence of the sea on Caribbean culture, the island as metaphor, and how global migration shapes societies and histories.
“Looking at the programmes for FILSAI and Macondo this year, I’m struck by a common concern with the role of writers and books in making connections across borders, boundaries, languages, and cultures,” says Nicholas Laughlin, festival and programme director of the Bocas Lit Fest. “It’s exciting to see past Bocas authors like these taking their work to new countries and new audiences, and it also proves yet again that contemporary Caribbean authors, living at home here in the region, are among the best in the world, and Caribbean stories have a truly worldwide resonance.
“When writers like Celeste Mohammed and Kevin Jared Hosein represent T&T at international festivals like these in San Andrés and Nairobi, it reminds us that Caribbean voices and ideas belong in global conversations, especially in times of contested values and rapidly changing alliances.” Laughlin adds. “Amplifying our voices has always been at the core of our work at the Bocas Lit Fest.”
