Since the Bocas Lit Fest and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature were announced last November, the organising team has been hard at work. Now, with just under three months to go until the festival opens, developments are speeding up — we’ll be posting more regular updates here at the Bocas Lit Fest blog and via Twitter and Facebook.
Here’s some news on the OCM Bocas Prize. With the deadline past, all the entered books — fiction, poetry, and non-fiction — have been sent off to our panel of judges. They are busy reading, thinking, scribbling notes, conferring, and working on the longlist of nine books — three from each genre category — scheduled to be announced at the end of February.
We’re very pleased that the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize has attracted entries from Caribbean writers based all over the world. Approximately sixty books have been entered, their authors representing thirteen Caribbean territories. Their imaginative and geographical range demonstrate the healthy diversity of contemporary Caribbean writing, and we don’t envy our judges the task of narrowing the entries down to the longlist — then the shortlist of one book from each category — and then the final winner, which will be announced during the Bocas Lit Fest.
Coming soon: news about the festival programme and invited authors!