Haven’t made it to a Bocas Lit Fest event yet? Maybe you’re wondering what it’s all about? Check out this interview with our Founder and Director, Marina Salandy Brown, done in 2013 by Janine Mendes-Franco for Global Voices:
The festival is a great event but it also only one aspect, albeit an important one, of the Bocas project. It is the shop window for our work, which focuses on our literature reclaiming the place and position it has lost to the competing interests of music and Carnival. The festival is a T&T affair, done in our style and drawing on our resources, but it is inclusive of our region and wherever our people live. It is also not just about writers, it is about readers and those interested in what books have to say, not just how their authors say it…
…We are trying to awaken and rekindle an interest in our literary output and to make it possible for the very many people who are writing, unsupported and unknown, to feel part of a community that is large and growing and to become part of an established literary world where they can hone their craft, get their books published and get their work out there to readers using all the means that are at our disposal.
We want to create excitement and optimism around the business of writing for oneself and others, of discovering and creating a “new” literature while drawing from the canon and the oral traditions.
See the full interview here: https://globalvoicesonline.org/2013/05/13/trinidad-tobago-talking-with-ngc-bocas-lit-fest-founder-marina-salandy-brown/.
You can find many other perspectives on the Bocas Lit Fest over at our Press page.