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.”
| UPDATED: 14:37, Wed, Dec 16, 2020
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The Queen has approved this year s winner of Her Majesty’s Gold Medal for Poetry for 2020, Daily Express royal correspondent Richard Palmer has revealed. This year s award has been bestowed upon Salford-born poet, author, translator and academic David Constantine.
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Caribbean poetry and reggae: A marriage in literature
[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.] Al Creighton (Stabroek News) begins his article with an excerpt of Lorna Goodison’s poem “For Don Drummond,” to explore the organic connections between Caribbean poetry and reggae.
In 1998, Peepal Tree Press in Leeds, UK, published
Wheel and Come Again, An Anthology of Reggae Poetry, selected by Kwame Dawes. By that time, the connection between poetry and reggae music had been long established. So was the affinity between poets and musicians, as the selections demonstrate.
Colin Channer, in the Preface, called it Caribbean poetry’s tribute to reggae music, but it goes much deeper as Dawes interrogated in his Introduction. Caribbean poetry and reggae music connect in various ways, many of which make themselves evident in the selections, sometimes the poets, and sometimes musicians to whom some poems are dedicated. Additionally, the
As the global pandemic continues more acute, and more egregiously mishandled, in some locations than others I can only say that I am experiencing a profound exhaustion, and I imagine many of
sx salon’s readers are as well. It is beyond me to behave in a business-as-usual manner even for the duration of this introduction, and I am not going to try. Instead I will invite you, our readers, to consider whether all the forces political cynicism, a profit-over-people orientation, scientific illiteracy and denialism, individualism run amok, and white supremacy that underpin catastrophically failed pandemic responses in some places are also responsible for creating the climate crisis to which the Caribbean is particularly vulnerable; the record-breaking 2020 hurricane season is yet another data point indicating the acceleration of that crisis. If COVID-19 is a harbinger of our climate resilience or lack thereof, the challenges that lie before us are daunting, to say the very least.