Arif Ali, Guyanese-born, London-based head of the Hansib publishing company, has been awarded the Henry Swanzy Award at the Bocas Lit Fest. The festival’s programme director, Nicholas Laughlin, made the announcement during the festival’s media launch at the National Library in Port of Spain on March 20.
Among the festival’s featured authors is Haitian-born American author Edwidge Danticat, whose works focus on the lives of women and issues of power, injustice, and poverty. Guayaguayare-born Dionne Brand, who lives in Canada, is a poet, novelist, essayist, and documentarian. Brand is Toronto’s third and first black poet laureate. Also on the line-up is Geetanjali Shree, an Indian Hindi-language novelist. Her novel Ret Samadhi, translated into English in 2018 by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand, won the International Booker Prize.
Barbadian speculative fiction writer Karen Lord won the 2008 Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Award for Best Unpublished Manuscript, the 2010 Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award, the 2011 Crawford Award, 2011 Mythopoeic Award, and 2012 Kitschies Golden Tentacle Award for the Best Debut Novel. Ingrid Persaud, a TT-born writer and artist living in the UK, won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2017 with The Sweet Sop. Her novel Love After Love won the 2020 Costa First Novel Award.
Special Bocas events include “Fantastic Friday,” focusing on Caribbean fantasy and folklore and discussions on ideological conflicts and the evolving role of newspapers in shaping intellectual development. The festival will also feature the announcement of the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize winner and the First Citizens National Poetry Slam finals. Activities for younger audiences, including storytelling caravans and children’s workshops, began this month.
The festival itself, from April 25-28, boasts a lineup of over 150 authors, speakers, and performers. Jean-Claude Cournand, Bocas CEO, said the event marked the festival’s 14th anniversary, and it had endured and thrived. “Over the years, the NGC Bocas Lit Fest has transformed from a mere event into a cultural institution, a cornerstone of Caribbean literary expression and creativity.“
Cournand said the festival is now a catalyst for a new generation of Caribbean voices, shaping what is becoming a modern canon of Caribbean literature. He said the Writers Centre on Alcazar Street had been rented and dedicated to nurturing Caribbean literature. While he celebrated the space, he used the opportunity to let the audience know that the festival would much rather own one.
“With NGC, we’ve expanded our reach, bringing on Paper Based to grow a bookshop specializing in Caribbean literature and collaborating with Full Bloom to create a welcoming space for readers and writers alike, complete with coffee and literary events.”
He said the festival’s journey has been about more than just hosting a festival; it has been about advancing Caribbean literature in all its forms. Its task is not just to remember the past or describe the present, but to imagine the future.
“B
