Books by authors from the US Virgin Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, and Jamaica have won the poetry, fiction, and non-fiction categories of the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, sponsored by One Caribbean Media, owner of the Trinidad and Tobago Express newspaper, TV6, and the OCM radio network.
Writers Nicole Sealey, Kevin Jared Hosein, and Safiya Sinclair will now compete for the overall Prize, considered the most prestigious award for Caribbean writing. In its 14th consecutive year, the OCM Bocas Prize recognises the best books published by authors of Caribbean birth or citizenship annually.
The Ferguson Report: An Erasure by US Virgin Islands–born Nicole Sealey has won the poetry category, after an excerpt from the book previously won the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. This formally innovative sequence reworks the official report of the US government’s investigation into the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The book, say the judges, “takes as its painstaking charge a poetry of realignment. It achieves, by visceral and ecstatic restraint, the poet’s remarkable control of an incremental song culled from the unspoken yield of racial myths. Sealey’s is the kind of looking and listening powerful enough to unearth an honest kind of speech from the façade and blurs of official record. These poems peel back the death mask of a perverse, spectral container where an almost silent lyric grows, syllable by syllable, into a final, life-giving gasp.”
Canisia Lubrin, St. Lucia-born poet and the 2021 winner of the overall OCM Bocas Prize, chaired the poetry panel, joined by British poet and editor Kayo Chingonyi and Jamaican poet Ann-Margaret Lim.
The winner in the fiction category is the novel Hungry Ghosts by Trinidadian Kevin Jared Hosein — “a compelling portrait of barrack life in 1940s Trinidad by a masterful storyteller,” the judges say. “Rendered in explosively lyrical prose, the ethnocultural landscape of its imagined world is at once historically illuminating and fraught with original spirit. Hosein paints the interior lives of his characters in ways that make this book one of the most powerful to come out of the Caribbean in recent times…. Themes of grief, loss, power, and desire, in all their manifestations, are acutely observed and handled with a deft touch.”
The fiction judges were chaired by Canada-based Trinidad-born novelist Rabindranath Maharaj, joined by UK literary agent Elise Dillsworth and Jamaican novelist and academic Curdella Forbes.
The final winner, in the non-fiction category, is How to Say Babylon: A Memoir by US-based Jamaican Safiya Sinclair — who previously won the 2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry with her debut Cannibal. “In a moving work of intense power, Safiya Sinclair writes with a novelist’s sensibility,” remark the judges, “demonstrating a remarkable command of narrative…. It is a memoir that reminds us of the expansive possibilities of creative non-fiction, bringing to the fore with unforgettable poetic verve a voice that is fierce, courageous, deeply intelligent, and empathetic, its nerve endings vibrating out from a specific experience of Rastafarianism into the currents of the wider world.”
The chair of the non-fiction panel, Guyana-born, Canada-based scholar D. Alissa Trotz, is joined by T&T writer Andre Bagoo — himself the winner of the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction — and US-based Jamaican academic and sx salon editor Rachel Mordecai.
The overall winner of the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize, chosen from the three genre winners and awarded US$10,000, will be announced on Saturday 27 April during the 2024 NGC Bocas Lit Fest. The other category winners will each receive US$3,000.
The three chairs of the genre panels now make up the final jury, joined by chief judge Edwidge Danticat, the acclaimed Haitian-American writer who won the OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction in 2011 and the OCM Bocas Prize for Fiction in 2020.
The festival will run from Thursday 25 to Sunday 28 April, at the National Library and Old Fire Station and other venues around Port of Spain.
The National Gas Company of Trinidad and Tobago is title sponsor of the NGC Bocas Lit Fest; OCM, First Citizens, the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and the Arts, and the British Council are main sponsors; Massy Foundation, UWI, and the JB Fernandes Memorial Trust are sponsors.