11.00–12.00
Two new memoirs and a collection of autobiographical poems tell stories of displacement and homecoming in the aftermath of complicated history. Hosted by Audrey Brown.
Speakers:
12.30–13.30
In their new writing – ranging from the 19th to the mid-20th century – these three writers excavate stories of a past that illuminate our present. Hosted by Nicholas Laughlin.
14.00–15.00
Three writers explore the complex Caribbean through a mosaic of characters and themes, a polyphony of voices and concerns. Hosted by Claire Adam.
15.30–16.30
If elements of the marvellous recur in Caribbean novels, it’s not because people live fairytale lives. Sometimes the only way to present the intricacy of the Caribbean past and present is through myth and folklore, the supernatural and the speculative. Hosted by Shivanee Ramlochan.
17.00–18.00
Ambitions and betrayals play out in our bloodlines and, for many Caribbean writers, ancestry can be both reassuring and discomfiting. Hosted by Isabelle Baafi.
18.30–19.30
For many writers of the Caribbean, home is not a straightforward concept. How do we define and understand ourselves, our communities, our solidarities in the collision of nation and imagination? Hosted by Nick Makoha.
20.00–21.00
To round off the day, Bocas Lit Fest and Renaissance One present an hour of lyrics, music, and performance.
Books by all participating writers are on sale at our book stall in the Entrance Hall. Catch our interval films on the main screen. There is food available in the Piazza. The bar, which is located by the book stall opens at 17.00.
Melanie Abrahams is a curator and producer. Over twenty years she’s collaborated widely, with Miami Book Fair, Chris Ofili, Bernardine Evaristo, and BBC/The Space and created Renaissance One, which supports Caribbean writers and artists worldwide.
Claire Adam’s multi-prizewinning debut novel Golden Child (Faber & Faber) was published in 2019 and translated into several languages. She is working on her second novel, set between Trinidad and Tobago, Britain, and Venezuela.
John Agard’s Inspector Dreadlock Holmes and Other Stories (Hope Road, 2022) is the first collection of fiction for adults by the distinguished Guyanese playwright, poet, and children’s writer, who received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2012, the BookTrust Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021, and numerous poetry prizes, and has authored over 50 books.
Isabelle Baafi is a poet and Reviews Editor at Poetry London, a Ledbury Poetry Critic, and an editor at Magma. Her debut pamphlet Ripe (ignitionpress, 2020) won a 2021 Somerset Maugham Award and was the Spring 2021 Poetry Book Society’s Pamphlet Choice.
Audrey Brown is a London-based South African broadcast journalist with BBC World Service flagship news and current affairs programmes Newshour and Focus on Africa. Her programmes document the lives of women in Africa and the diaspora.
Cecil Browne is the author of “A Hat for Lemer”, a short story set in post-Emancipation St. Vincent and the Grenadines, which won the 2022 Commonwealth Writers Prize (UK and Europe). He has published several books of short fiction.
Fred D’Aguiar is a British-Guyanese prizewinning author of twelve books, including novels, poems and plays. Year of Plagues: A Memoir of 2020 is his latest book, his first non-fiction work, and was the New Statesman and Times Literary Supplement (TLS) Book of the Year in 2021.
Sophie Jai’s debut novel Wild Fires (Harper Collins) led to a writing residency and a visiting fellowship at the University of Oxford. It was also longlisted for the 2019 Peggy Chapman Andrews First Novel Award.
Barbara Jenkins’s memoir The Stranger Who Was Myself (Peepal Tree Press, 2022) is the Trinidadian author’s latest book. Her debut novel, De Rightest Place, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Christopher Bland Prize.
Anthony Joseph is an award-winning Trinidad-born poet, novelist, academic, and musician, author of five poetry collections – including Sonnets for Albert shortlisted for the 2022 Forward Prize for Best Collection – and three novels. He lectures in Creative Writing at Kings College, London.
Nicholas Laughlin is festival and programme director of the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, and author of two poetry collections, most recently Enemy Luck (Peepal Tree Press, 2019). He is also co-director of Alice Yard, a contemporary art collective based in Port of Spain.
Dominique Le Gendre is a composer whose work spans performance, direction, production,teaching, curation, compositions for theatre, dance, art installations, TV, films and radio drama. She co-produced Playboy of the West Indies: A Musical.
Ayanna Lloyd Banwo is the Trinidadian author of the highly acclaimed novel When We Were Birds (Hamish Hamilton), which The Observer named one of the best debut novels of 2022. She is a Creative Writing PhD candidate at UEA. Karen Lord is the author of the prize-winning Redemption in Indigo, the speculative fiction novels The Best of All Possible Worlds and The Galaxy Game, and the crime fantasy novel Unravelling.
Canisia Lubrin’s poetry collection The Dyzgraphxst won the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the WindhamCampbell Prize for poetry, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Derek Walcott Prize, and the 2021 Joseph Stauffer Literature Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts.
Nick Makoha is a London-based Ugandan poet, playwright and founder of Obsidian. Winner of the 2021 Ivan Juritz Prize, his debut Kingdom of Gravity was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize and nominated by the Guardian as one of the best books of 2017.
Randolph Matthews is a composer, musical director and songwriter/vocalist who performs both solo and collaboratively through live performances and writing.
Ira Mathur is the debut author of Love the Dark Days (Peepal Tree Press, 2022), a memoir about the emotional ruins of Empire on three generations of women, set in Trinidad, St Lucia, India, and Britain, and bookended by a weekend with Derek Walcott.
Tessa McWatt is the author of seven novels. Her memoir Shame On Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging won the 2020 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2020, Hilary Weston Prize. She received a 2018 Eccles British Library Writers Award.
Pauline Melville’s Master of Chaos (Sandstone Press, 2021) is the latest short story collection from the acclaimed Guyanese/British writer, whose work has won numerous literary awards and has been translated into ten languages.
Celeste Mohammed’s debut novel-in-stories Pleasantview (Jacaranda Books, 2021) won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the UK Society of Authors McKitterick Prize.
Nadifa Mohamed is a prizewinning British-Somali novelist. TheFortune Men was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize andthe Costa Novel Award and longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. She is one of Granta’s 2013 Best of Young British Novelists.
Grace Nichols’s Passport to Here and There (2020) is the latest book by this prolific and acclaimed Guyanese writer and playwright and the most recent recipient of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Her first collection, I Is a Long Memoried Woman (1983), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize.
Ingrid Persaud is the winner of the 2020 Costa First Novel Award 2020 for Love After Love (Faber & Faber), set in her native Trinidad. She also won the 2018 BBC National Short Story Award and the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
Gleanne Purcell-Brown plays Peggy in the musical production of deceased Trinidadian playwright Mustapha Matura’s Playboy of the West Indies (Birmingham Rep, June 2022).
Shivanee Ramlochan is a Trinidadian poet, critic, book blogger. Her debut Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (Peepal Tree Press) was a 2018 People’s Choice T&T Book of the Year finalist and shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection.
Jacob Ross’s Black Rain Falling (Hachette UK, 2020) was one of the Guardian’s Best Crime Books of the Month in 2020. The Bone Readers (Peepal Tree Press) won the inaugural Jhalak Prize in 2017.
Amanda Smyth is the prizewinning Irish-Trinidadian author of three novels. Fortune (Peepal Tree Press, 2021) is her latest. Black Rock (Serpents Tail) won the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger, and was selected as an Oprah Winfrey Summer Read.
Celia A Sorhaindo’s poetry chapbook Guabancex (Papillote Press, 2020) was longlisted for the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and Radical Normalisation, her first full length poetry collection, was just published by Carcanet Press.
See full bios of all writers at bocaslitfest.com