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Open Book
Programme looking at new fiction and non-fiction books, talking to authors and publishers and unearthing lost classics
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2021 Bocas Henry Swanzy Awardees Named
The 2021 recipients of the Bocas Henry Swanzy Award are Jamaicans Edward Baugh and Mervyn Morris both professors emeriti of the University of the West Indies.
Baugh and Morris are widely considered pioneers of the study of West Indian literature, over careers that each span half a century. Now they are to be honoured by the Bocas Lit Fest with the annual
Bocas Henry Swanzy Award for Distinguished Service to Caribbean Letters.
The Award, established in 2013, is named for the late BBC radio producer Henry Swanzy. Irish by birth, Swanzy worked as producer of the influential
Monique Roffey has finally tasted financial success thanks to the Costa
Credit: Geoff Pugh
Winning a book prize isn’t only a huge ego-boost for novelists; it can literally pay the rent. This week, Monique Roffey went from being unable this month to pay her landlord to becoming rich enough to put down a year’s rent in advance when she won the Costa Book of the Year for The Mermaid of Black Conch, a magic-realist modern-day fable set on a fictional Caribbean island.
Her acceptance speech, in which she mentioned her bounced rent cheque, brought to mind interviews given by Anna Burns who, prior to winning the Booker Prize in 2018 for Milkman, had been so lacking in funds she’d been compelled to use food banks. The sobering fact is that both women were established writers in their 50s, previously shortlisted for the Orange Prize. Since when did our novelists, those hallowed custodians of our literary culture, become so impoverished they can barely afford to eat?
Last modified on Thu 28 Jan 2021 06.48 EST
After two decades of splashing around in the shallows of success, Monique Roffey was taking no chances with The Mermaid of Black Conch. The novel, which won the Costa book of the year award on Tuesday, is written in a Creole English and uses a patchwork of forms, from poetry to journal entries and an omniscient narrator, and “employs magical realism to the max”. Even its title was against it, she realised. “You’re either going to read a novel about a mermaid or you aren’t.”
Any one of these, she says, would scare away most publishers. So when one, the independent Peepal Tree Press, did bite, she launched a crowdfunder to enable her to hire her own publicist. It’s a mark of the esteem in which the 55-year-old author and university lecturer is held by those familiar with her work that 116 people chipped in, raising £4,500 within a month. Then, two weeks before the novel was due to be published, the UK went into lockdown, shutt