More Than A Literary Festival

100 Caribbean Books that made us Podcast

The NGC Bocas Lit Fest’s 100 Caribbean Books That Made Us podcast series celebrates and explores how iconic Caribbean books have influenced and inspired writers of today.

Released in April 2021, the 100 Caribbean Books That Made Us is a list of literary works in all genres — poetry, fiction, and non-fiction — crowdsourced by the NGC Bocas Lit Fest with input from readers across the Caribbean and its diasporas.

In this podcast series, writers of today share their insights into now-classic Caribbean books of the past, tracing lines of literary influence across generations.

Episode 3: Zong!

In our third episode, Desiree Seebaran explores the groundbreaking form of M. NourbeSe Philip’s poetry collection Zong!, published in 2008, addressing the brutal, haunting realities of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans.

Desiree Seebaran is a writer and editor from Trinidad and Tobago, the 2021 winner of the Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers Prize. She is currently at work on her first book of poems.

Episode 2: Ways of Sunlight

In our second episode, Vashti Bowlah considers the short story collection Ways of Sunlight by Samuel Selvon, first published in 1957, which brings together classic stories of rural life in Trinidad with tales of West Indian immigrants in London.

Vashti Bowlah is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago, author of the short fiction collections Under the Peepal Tree and Sugarcane Valley, which tackle similar settings and subjects to Selvon’s beloved stories, from the perspective of a younger generation.

Episode 1: No Pain Like This Body

In our first episode, Kevin Jared Hosein reflects on the novel No Pain Like This Body by Harold Sonny Ladoo, first published in 1972, and set in turn-of-the-century Trinidad in an Indo-Trinidadian farming community.

Kevin Jared Hosein is a fiction writer from Trinidad and Tobago. A past winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and a Burt Award for Caribbean Literature, he is the author of four books, including the forthcoming novel Hungry Ghosts.

Stay tuned for more episodes

Stay tuned for more episodes of the 100 Caribbean Books That Made Us podcast!

Podcast Episodes Copyright © Bocas Lit Fest, 2022
Episode Scripts Copyright © The Individual Authors, 2022
Produced for the Bocas Lit Fest by Franka Philip/Trini Good Media
Sound design by Lyndon Livingstone

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