This year’s chair of the fiction judging panel for the OCM Bocas Prize, Michael Bucknor, is the head of the Department of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies’ campus in Mona, Jamaica. An editor of the Journal of West Indian Literature, Bucknor’s scholarly accolades include a Ph.D. at the University of Western Ontario (Canada) on a Commonwealth Scholarship; and a 2002 Du bois-Mandela-Rodney Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Michigan. His eminent scholarly work is most recently on display in the 2011 Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, co-edited with Alison Donnell. Encompassing sixty-nine entries on the foundation, evolution and dissemination of Caribbean Literature in the English-speaking world, the collection features critical assessments from both veteran scholars as well as emergent voices in the field.
Reviewing the Routledge Companion, H. Adlai Murdoch speaks to its extreme ambition, concluding that the compendium “makes a valuable addition to the available arsenal of criticism on regional literary production. Its telling analyses of authors and critics, movements and genres, history and culture, provide a wealth of welcome information that illuminates the context and continuity of Caribbean writing.” (full downloadable review here)
Where can you see Michael Bucknor at this year’s festival?
- Friday, April 26th: A short talk with Alison Donnell, on The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature. (11 am–12 pm, Old Fire Station)