How can creative writing help spread awareness about the critical issue of climate justice? And how does one craft compelling fiction and poetry that provoke debate?
Writing For Our Lives, an anthology on climate justice featuring 18 established and emerging writers from eight Caribbean territories, offers multiple answers and approaches.
Three of the book’s Trinidad and Tobago’s contributors – Amanda T McIntyre, Portia Subran, Judy Raymond – will share their ideas and insights at a special event at The Writers Centre on September 13 at 5.30 pm. They will join Omar Mohammed, author of the anthology’s afterword and director on the Board of Trustees for The Cropper Foundation, in a wide-ranging discussion.
Subran, winner of the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the Caribbean region, will read from her prose fiction piece Goodbye La Luna. McIntyre, 2025 Nieuwe Instituut/Tilting Axis Fellow, will share her poem Writer in Residence on Earth. And Raymond, former editor in chief of the Trinidad Guardian and Newsday, will read from her short story Island in the Sun.
Writing For Our Lives, funded by Open Society Foundations, commissioned by The Cropper Foundation, and published by Peekash Press, had its global launch at the 15th Bocas Lit Fest in May. Co-edited by Jamaican novelist and environmentalist Diana McCaulay and Trinidadian poet and essayist Shivanee Ramlochan, Writing For Our Lives is dedicated to the late Funso Aiyejina, who for over two decades co-facilitated, alongside Merle Hodge, The Cropper Foundation’s residential workshops that trained so many leading contemporary Caribbean writers.
Addressing the book’s ongoing relevance, Ardene Sirjoo, communications and civil society lead at The Cropper Foundation, said, “Twenty-five years ago, The Cropper Foundation was created as a testament to Caribbean imagination, convening some of the best and boldest minds of the time. In this milestone anniversary year, we’re especially pleased to invoke the foundation’s literary legacy as we continue to shine a light on this Caribbean climate justice anthology – a collection of stories, poems and essays speaking to the most pressing existential threat of our time.”
Paper Based Bookshop will have copies of the anthology for sale on September 13, and Sleepy Cat Cafe will be open with hot and cold drinks and pastries for sale.
The event is free and open to the public; all are invited.
The Writers Centre, 14 Alcazar Street, St Clair, is the home of the Bocas Lit Fest, Paper Based Bookshop and the Sleepy Cat Cafe.
