by Shivanee Ramlochan, 2013 NGC Bocas Lit Fest Blogger.
The Festival Welcomes of each Bocas Lit Fest have been spectacularly well-attended since their inception in 2011, and this year continued (and deepened) that trend admirably: attendees were fairly spilling out of the Old Fire Station on April 25th, including a generous cross-section of our programme writers. Media mavens flocked near the podium, where Festival Director and Bocas foundress Marina Salandy-Brown beamingly introduced the first official event of the four-day carnival of literary festivities: Writers vs. Politicians, a series of political portraits read by prominent local figures, each of them compelling orators in their own right.
In addition to Maraj’s spirited rendition, the other political-fiction offerings included:
- Parliamentarian Paula Gopee-Scoon, reading from Monique Roffey’s The White Woman on the Green Bicycle
- Attorney and columnist Martin Daly, reading from Austin Clarke’s The Prime Minister
- Journalist and Trinidad and Tobago Review editor Sunity Maharaj, reading from Pauline Melville’s “I Don’t Take Messages from Dead People”
This slate of thought-titillating fictive material, brought to strident life in the voices of some of our favourite local luminaries, pre-set the stage for Sunday’s Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference panel on “Should Literature be Political?”, which unsurprisingly turned out to be another jam-packed Old Fire Station session, where the eyes of the literary world were anchored firmly on Bocas’s EWWC voices!
Photographs by Maria Nunes, Official Festival Photographer.