In Jamaica, Rebel Women Lit Launches the Caribbean Readers’ Awards
Book club and literary community Rebel Women Lit aims to ‘showcase the amazing range’ of Caribbean literature with the newly launched Caribbean Readers’ Awards.
Shortlisted titles for the 2020 edition of the newly launched Caribbean Readers’ Awards. Image: Rebel Women Lit
By Hannah Johnson | @hannahsjohnson
‘2020 Was a Big Year for Caribbean Authors’
Voting is now open for the debut cycle of the Caribbean Readers’ Awards, a new initiative from the Jamaica-based book club and literary community Rebel Women Lit, founded in 2017 by Jherane Patmore.
“Caribbean literature is so much more diverse than our scholastic reading lists would suggest,” says Patmore in a prepared statement on the launch of the awards. “Rebel Women Lit decided to create these awards so that we can showcase the amazing range that Caribbean lit has to offer.”
Born in 1585, Catalina de Erauso led one of the most wildly fantastic lives of any woman in history. Refusing to be regimented into the quiet habits of a nun s life, she escaped from a Basque convent at age fourteen dressed as a man, and continuing her deception, ventured to Peru and Chile as a soldier in the Spanish army. After mistakenly killing her own brother in a duel, she roamed the Andean highlands, becoming a gambler and a killer, and always just evading the grasp of the law. Distinguished for her fighting skills and cursed with a quick temper, Catalina de Erauso spent much of her life balancing precariously between valor and villainy.