Longlist for the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize

The judging panels for the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize have announced a longlist of ten books in the three genre categories, with a further three books receiving special mention:

POETRY

Dark and Unaccustomed Words, by Vahni Capildeo (Trinidad and Tobago)
Fault Lines, by Kendel Hippolyte (St Lucia)
South Eastern Stages, by Anthony Kellman (Barbados)

Special mention:
The Festival of Wild Orchid, by Margaret Ann Lim (Jamaica)

FICTION

This Is How You Lose Her, by Junot Díaz (Dominican Republic/USA)
Archipelago, by Monique Roffey (Trinidad and Tobago)
Light Falling on Bamboo, by Lawrence Scott (Trinidad and Tobago)
God Carlos, by Anthony C. Winkler (Jamaica)

NON-FICTION

The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race, by Jemima Pierre (Haiti/USA)
The Sky’s Wild Noise: Selected Essays, by Rupert Roopnaraine (Guyana)
Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire, by Andrea Stuart (Barbados)

Special mention:
Abolition and Plantation Management in Jamaica, 1807–1838, by Dave St Aubyn Gosse (Jamaica)
Ismith Khan: The Man and His Work, by Roydon Salick (Trinidad and Tobago)

The prize shortlist will be announced in March 2013.

OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, 2012

Caribbean writing gets another boost with the second OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, which will reward the best Caribbean book published this year with a US$10,000 prize. Entries were opened on September 16, and the 2012 prize will be announced in April next year at the Bocas Lit Fest, T&T’s annual literary festival. The best book is chosen from the winner in each of three categories—non-fiction, fiction and poetry. Published writers who are Caribbean by birth or citizenship, living and working anywhere in the world, are eligible for the prize, which in 2011, its inaugural year, attracted 60 entries from more than a dozen countries.

For more, please follow this link: http://www.guardian.co.tt/lifestyle/2011/09/20/caribbean-writing-gets-another-boost-us10000-prize

Derek Walcott Wins 2011 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

From Trinidad Express:

White Egrets, his collection of poetry that has already won the TS Eliot Prize and was judged the winner of the OCM Bocas Prize poetry category, was chosen for the US$10,000 award last night, seeing off competition from the fiction and non-fiction winners.

The judges in their citation commented upon the "seemingly effortless flow of the language and imagery despite the poet's stated premonitions of the loss of poetic power and inspiration…. Walcott is still writing great poetry, lovely cadences, beautiful images".

They considered the book-length poem that is divided into separate poems and is an exploration of bereavement and grief in one's advanced years to be, "a book that tells of a period of life more usually talked at and talked about than heard from or listened to, which makes it a very important work".

For more information, please follow this link:

http://www.trinidadexpress.com/news/Derek_Walcott_wins_OCM_Bocas_Prize-121040233.html

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The 2011 Bocas Lit Fest Program

The 2011 Bocas Lit Fest program features over fifty events spread over four days, from April 28 to May 1, 2011. The Bocas Lit Fest: the Trinidad and Tobago Literary Festival is an annual celebration of books, writing, and writers.  The main venue for the events will be the National Library of Trinidad and Tobago (shown above).

The Bocas Lit fest site explains: “Boca is the Spanish word for mouth—the organ of speech and song and storytelling. And the Bocas del Dragón—the Dragon’s Mouths— are the narrow straits off Trinidad’s northwest peninsula, which connect the sheltered Gulf of Paria to the open Caribbean Sea. For centuries, the Bocas were the gateways connecting Trinidad to the Caribbean and the Atlantic. The Bocas Lit Fest invites readers from around the world to enter through the Dragon’s Mouths and celebrate with us the rich literary heritage of Trinidad and Tobago and the wider Caribbean.”

Via Repeating Islands

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Longlist for Bocas Prize Announced

Ten writers representing six different countries are in the running for the 2011 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, sponsored by One Caribbean Media. The Prize longlist, announced by the judges on 28 February, 2011, includes three books of poetry, four of fiction, and three of non-fiction. The writers range from Nobel laureates to debut authors.

In the poetry category, the three contenders are all extended meditations on themes of memory, loss, and hope. Kamau Brathwaite’s elegiac and typographically complex Elegguas joins Kei Miller’s uplifting collectionA Light Song of Light and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott’s White Egrets, which muses over age and mortality.

Three novels and a book of short fiction vie in the fiction category. Myriam Chancy’s The Loneliness of Angels, steeped in Haitian history, charts human connections across gulfs of time and space. Karen Lord’sRedemption in Indigo, inspired by a Senegalese folktale, plays with the conventions of traditional storytelling. Rabindranath Maharaj’s The Amazing Absorbing Boy offers a fresh take on the Caribbean migrant experience. And Tiphanie Yanique’s How to Escape a Leper Colony lyrically explores its characters’ emotional intimacy.

The non-fiction category brings together Beauty and Sadness, a collection of literary criticism and memoir by Andre Alexis; Edwidge Danticat’s Create Dangerously, a series of essays on the role of the “immigrant artist”; and Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul’s travel narrative The Masque of Africa, which investigates the survival of indigenous religious beliefs on the continent.

The judges read approximately sixty books entered for the Prize, which will be presented for the first time in 2011. The OCM Bocas Prize is open to books by Caribbean writers published in the previous calendar year, and comes with an award of US$10,000. The winners in the three genre categories will be announced on 28 March, and the Prize will be presented on 30 April, during the first annual Bocas Lit Fest in Port of Spain


Via: http://www.bocaslitfest.com/1/post/2011/02/2011-ocm-bocas-prize-longlist-announced.html

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