Poetry podcasts from the 2011 festival
Relive the pleasure of being in the audience at the inaugural NGC Bocas Lit Fest! 3×3 is a series of three podcasts, each featuring live recordings of three poets from the 2011 festival, reading from their work. Listen here. Presenter: Georgia Popplewell Producer: Marina Salandy-Brown Executive producer: Bocas Lit Fest
Bocas goes to Miami
The body of water Miami faces is the Atlantic Ocean, but — 180 miles from Nassau, 220 miles from Havana — there’s no doubt it’s also a Caribbean city. And for a few days in mid-October, Miami will also be a major hub for Caribbean literary scholarship, as the University of Miami hosts the 31st […]
Bocas goes to Brooklyn
New York probably has a bigger concentration of Caribbean people — immigrants and diaspora descendants — than any other city in the world. And everyone knows that New York’s Caribbean capital is the borough of Brooklyn. So it’s entirely fitting that the 2012 Brooklyn Book Festival will mark the 50th anniversary of Independence in Trinidad and Tobago […]
The 2013 Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize
The Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize is an annual award which allows an emerging Caribbean writer living and working in the Anglophone Caribbean to devote time to advancing or finishing a literary work, with support from an established writer as mentor. It is sponsored by the Hollick Family Charitable Trust and the literary charitable trust […]
Paper Based: 25 Years of Bookselling Excellence
By Shivanee Ramlochan, 2012 Bocas Lit fest blogger The 2012 OCM Bocas Shortlist titles (and others) in Paper Based’s display! A few days before the adrenaline high of the 2012 NGC Bocas Lit Fest was launched, I had the opportunity to sit in the lobby of the Hotel Normandie with Joan Dayal, the proprietress of […]
Judge Spotlight: Fred D’Aguiar
By Shivanee Ramlochan, 2012 Bocas Lit fest blogger Greetings, Bocas enthusiasts! If you’ve been keeping abreast of current news, you’ll have noted, with delight, that the official longlist for this year’s prize was announced over the weekend. I’m guessing that many of us have now acquired a substantial, exciting reading list, comprising of some, most, […]
2011 Bocas Retrospective: Tiphanie Yanique’s “How to Escape from a Leper Colony”
By Shivanee Ramlochan, 2012 Bocas Lit fest blogger One of the highlights, for me, at 2011’s Bocas, was listening to Tiphanie Yanique read from her collection of short and longer fictions, How to Escape from a Leper Colony. Winner of the Fiction arm of the OCM Bocas Prize, this gathering of stories about place and identity […]
Poetry: Fred D’Aguiar and Shara McCallum
By Shivanee Ramlochan, 2012 Bocas Lit fest blogger D’Aguiar and McCallum discuss their work with Giselle Rampaul after the reading. It’s frankly amazing, the ways in which attending the Bocas Lit Fest can make you feel that you’ve absorbed months of vital creative atmosphere, in the space of just four days. My enjoyment of the […]
Fiction: Rivka Galchen and Monique Roffey
By Shivanee Ramlochan, 2012 Bocas Lit fest blogger Rivka Galchen reads from Atmospheric Disturbances. One of the things I admire best about Bocas it its inclusiveness. Its team has never declared, “No, you’ve got not one drop of Caribbean blood in you, so you’ll be barred at the gates, foreign writer!” This isn’t to say that […]
Poetry: Andre Bagoo and Vahni Capildeo
By Shivanee Ramlochan, 2012 Bocas Lit fest blogger Andre Bagoo begins his reading. “Tissues and bones, it was a trick”– Grizzly Bear, ‘Ready, Able’This is one of the epigraphs that introduces you to Andre Bagoo’s 2012 poetry collection, Trick Vessels. The other is a brief account of how a trick vessel functions: by hidden, possibly elaborate, possibly […]
Photo-Journal: Performance Poetry and Open Mic Sessions!
Arguably one of the liveliest events at last year’s Bocas Lit Fest, the Abercromby Street Arcade performance poetry and open mic jam sessions proved to be no less colourful this time around. Event organizers, prominent artists Gillian Moor and Muhammad Muwakil, were thrilled at the large turnout this year, and worked hard to organize a […]
The Big Idea: The NGC Bocas Lecture on Human Races
By Shivanee Ramlochan, 2012 Bocas Lit fest blogger Rabindranath Maharaj reads, with Ken Ramchand listening on. Immigration has become more than your grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ yellowing photographs on the mantelpiece. Rabindranath Maharaj, author of The Amazing Absorbing Boy, makes the case for this in his most recent novel, in telling the story of a new type […]
Announcing the Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize
The NGC Bocas Lit Fest’s big news on the night of Saturday 28 April was the announcement of the winner of the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. By now, many readers know that Trinidadian novelist Earl Lovelace took home the US$10,000 award for his novel Is Just a Movie — the news has spread far and […]
Poetry: Nicolette Bethel and Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming
By Shivanee Ramlochan, 2012 Bocas Lit fest blogger Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming reads her poems. A welcome slice of Bahamian artistry was brought resoundingly to life in the AV Room of the National Library on Friday afternoon, when the writers Nicolette Bethel and Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming shared their poems with infectious gusto, passion and intensity.Manoo-Rahming read first, quickly […]
Talking with Lisa Allen-Agostini about The Allen Prize for Young Writers
By Shivanee Ramlochan, 2012 Bocas Lit fest blogger Lisa Allen-Agostini. Photo: Richard Acosta I tell her I’ve been writing since I was 11. A strange thing happens to me when Lisa Allen-Agostini then puts this pointed, precise question to me during our mid-Bocas Festival conversation:“How did you feel, at 11, as a young writer, beginning […]
Discussion: Heart of Darkness — Caribbean Noir
By Shivanee Ramlochan, 2012 Bocas Lit fest blogger Lisa Allen-Agostini, Johnny Temple and Achy Obejas discuss regional noir’s qualities. More dead bodies, please!The truly funny thing is that Trinidad Noir editor Lisa Allen-Agostini was only half-jesting when she claimed that this is what’s needed to populate an authentic noir story. Actually, Lisa’s co-panellists, Johnny Temple and Achy […]
Poetry: Kendell Hippolyte and Lasana Sekou
By Shivanee Ramlochan, 2012 Bocas Lit fest blogger Lasana Sekou takes to the aisles during his poetry reading! Our spirited moderator Rose-Ann Walker reminded us as we settled in for this, the first poetry reading of Bocas 2012, that both Kendel Hippolyte and Lasana Sekou are studied at the secondary school level. The youth of […]
Fiction: Erna Brodber and Karen Lord
By Shivanee Ramlochan, 2012 Bocas Lit fest blogger Erna Brodber answers Lisa Allen-Agostini’s question, as Karen Lord listens. It can be vaguely (or extremely) surreal to realize, “Hey… I’m sitting in the same room asErna Brodber… does… does she know who she is?” I know, I sound like a fangirl, which is apt, because in […]
New Talent Showcase: Sharon Millar
By Shivanee Ramlochan, 2012 Bocas Lit fest blogger Nicholas Laughlin listens as Sharon Millar reads her story. It’s difficult not to think of Sharon Millar as her own well-deserved success story. The second of Bocas 2012’s New Talent Showcase writers, Millar read on Friday afternoon to the packed room of the Old Fire Station, a […]
Short Talk: Brendan de Caires and PEN Canada
By Shivanee Ramlochan, 2012 Bocas Lit fest blogger Nicholas Laughlin talks with Brendan de Caires. PEN Canada believes that free expression matters. They do; it’s on their website. More importantly, it’s imbedded into every act of intercessory advocacy they create – and these intercessions create movements. These intercessions save the lives of people who then […]
A Festival Welcome of Independence Readings
By Shivanee Ramlochan, 2012 Bocas Lit fest blogger A lifelong appreciation for Caribbean literature – this is what surrounded me as I sat in the Old Fire Station yesterday morning, flanked by both writing luminaries and bookish enthusiasts alike. The rain pattered outside, the sounds of sirens and blaring car horns echoed mere feet away […]
Fiction Reading: Sharon Leach and Kei Miller
By Shivanee Ramlochan, 2012 Bocas Lit fest blogger I’ve been wildly excited about hearing Kei Miller read his work, but it turned out that I should have been every bit as enthused to hear Sharon Leach. This was Bocas 2012’s first full-length fiction session, and it launched that author-reader sharing space in encouraging, warm fashion. Both writers […]
My Bocas Lit Fest Diary: Bocas’ Eve
By Shivanee Ramlochan, 2012 Bocas Lit fest blogger The second Discussion in Thursday’s lineup! Last year, in April, at least an entire library of my bookish dreams became page-turning realities, when I attended, and blogged for, the 2011 Bocas Lit Fest. One of the best things about this year’s festival is that I have the […]
Events for new and emerging writers
The 2012 NGC Bocas Lit Fest line-up includes readings and talks by a slate of remarkable writers at all stages of their careers — from eminent prize-winners whose works are already considered classics, to debut authors at the start of promising careers. But the festival also includes many events focused on budding and newly emerging […]
“The Night Grew Dark Around Us”, a poem by Andre Bagoo
With less than a week to go till the start of the 2012 NGC Bocas Lit Fest, we’re happy to share another poem by one of this year’s festival authors, again drawn from the archive of The Caribbean Review of Books. “The Night Grew Dark Around Us” by Andre Bagoo was published in the September 2011 CRB. […]
Creating The Spaces Between Words
The Spaces Between Words is a series of literary podcasts, produced and edited by Giselle Rampaul of the University of the West Indies, and supported by the Literatures in English section at UWI’s St. Augustine campus. Spaces is also a partner of the 2012 NGC Bocas Lit Fest. At last year’s festival, Rampaul and her team recorded interviews […]
60 writers + 90 events = the 2012 NGC Bocas Lit Fest
Bocas fans have been asking for months about our 2012 schedule. Well, after lots of hard work and preparation, and with just five weeks to go before the 2012 NGC Bocas Lit Fest, we’re thrilled and excited to announce our festival programme (see it here) and list of participating authors (here). We went public with […]
Notes from Norwich
NGC Bocas Lit Fest programme director Nicholas Laughlin recently participated in the Norwich Showcase, an “international platform for British writing and literature development” co-hosted by the British Council and Writers’ Centre Norwich. He describes the highlights of this five-day event, bringing together British and international literary professionals for a packed schedule of readings, discussions, and informal […]
2012 OCM Bocas Prize shortlist announced
Writers from Trinidad and Tobago, Puerto Rico, and Belize have been shortlisted for the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. From a longlist of ten impressive titles, this year’s Prize judges have whittled down a shortlist of three books, by a prolific Commonwealth Writers’ Prize–winning storyteller, a professor of Caribbean literature and creative writing, […]
Judge Spotlight: Ellah Allfrey
By Shivanee Ramlochan, 2012 Bocas Lit fest blogger Dear fellow lit. fest. enthusiasts, we’re only a few hours away until the official OCM Bocas Prize Shortlist is announced, bright and early tomorrow! I’m spectacularly excited, and I can only imagine that you are, too. Are you crossing your fingers (or bookmarking your pages) for your […]