Colonising literature in reverse
Canadian-Guyanese writer Tessa McWatt, author of Shame on Me. -
The following is a recap by the Bocas Lit Fest of the events it held despite this pandemic year.
In its diverse subjects and themes, in the broad dispersal of both writers and readers, Caribbean literature has a global sweep. Two generations ago, the Jamaican poet Louise Bennett-Coverley wrote about Caribbean people “colonising in reverse” and, indeed, contemporary Caribbean authors have helped shift and broaden the focus of the international literary world, changing the conversation in every way.
Raising the international profile of Caribbean authors and building a broader readership for Caribbean writing outside the region has been a key objective of the Bocas Lit Fest for the past decade. Through strategic partnerships with international cultural agencies such as the Commonwealth Foundation and the British Council, as well as international literary festivals, Bocas has creat
Leslie Jamison: La adicción te deja atrapada en un Día de la Marmota
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The Gatekeepers brings book deal for Trini writer Lloyd
Thursday 17 December 2020
Ayanna Gillian Lloyd, left, Uganda-born British poet Nick Makoha and Trinidadian Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné at the 2019 Bocas Lit Fest. -
BEFORE she started writing The Gatekeepers, Trinidad-born, UK-based writer Ayanna Gillian Lloyd spent a lot of time in cemeteries and was always struck, “by the way Lapeyrouse Cemetery (Port of Spain) in particular was a history lesson – a little city within a city, a world of its own.”
She said the idea for her debut novel, The Gatekeepers, grew out of “thinking through the ways that we live with death and how our cultural deathways hold (or hide) important histories.”
[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.] Janine Mendes-Franco (
Global Voices) writes about Marina Salandy-Brown’s contributions to the arts and literary world, especially in the Anglophone Caribbean, and her recent recognition as Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and as recipient of Chile’s inaugural Ferdinand Magellan Award for Innovation.
For the last 10 years, Marina Salandy-Brown has been expanding the scope and reach of the NGC Bocas Lit Fest (named for its title sponsor, the National Gas Company of Trinidad and Tobago), now widely considered the Caribbean’s premier literary festival, but she’s been a reader all her life. Her passion for the region’s literature has now earned her an honorary fellowship in the Royal Society of Literature (RSL), which is celebrating its 200th anniversary this year.
John Quin
, December 12th, 2020 09:29
A post-punk memoir transforms into a devastating slowburn tragedy in Andrew O’Hagan s novel, Mayflies
East Kilbride, 1979: Ronnie Tulley, Eddie Thompson, Paul McCluskey, and yours truly swapping Talking Heads albums. We saw Josef K live with the band done up in face paint à la Brando’s Kurtz in
Apocalypse Now! We nicked a drum stick from XTC’s Terry Chambers. You’re thinking:
so what? Why am I telling you the humdrum everyday history of me and my old mates? Who gives a fig about a new town animal trying to escape his furnished cage? This was roughly my initial response to the first half of
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