Arif Ali
Arif Ali, the esteemed founder of Hansib Publications, has dedicated his life to preserving and promoting Caribbean culture, history, and literature. Recognised for this remarkable contribution, Ali has been named the recipient of the 2024 Bocas Henry Swanzy Award for Distinguished Service to Caribbean Letters. Born in Danielstown, British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1935, Ali […]
Sandra Pouchet Paquet
Sandra Pouchet Paquet is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Miami. She is the author of The Novels of George Lamming (1982), Caribbean Autobiography (2002), and co-editor of Music, Memory, Resistance: Calypso and the Caribbean Literary Imagination (2007). She has published widely in Caribbean literature in the leading journals in the field and […]
Anne Walmsley
Anne Walmsley is a British-born editor, scholar, critic and author, notable as a specialist in Caribbean art and literature, whose career spans five decades. She is the recipient of the 2018 Bocas Henry Swanzy Award. She is widely recognised for her work as Longman’s Caribbean publisher, and for Caribbean books that she authored and edited, including the landmark […]
Joan Dayal
Joan Dayal, proprietor of Paper Based, one of the Caribbean’s leading independent bookshops, is the recipient of the 2017 Bocas Henry Swanzy Award for Distinguished Service to Caribbean Letters. Since its inception, Paper Based has been home not only to the sale of titles in Caribbean fiction, non-fiction, and poetry: through a regular reading series, […]
Sarah White
Sarah White, joint recipient of the 2013 Bocas Henry Swanzy Award with her late husband John La Rose, started life as a science historian and worked for fifteen years as the Soviet Science consultant to the New Scientist magazine. In 1966 she and her partner, the late Trinidadian poet and activist John La Rose, founded New Beacon Books, the […]
Mervyn Morris
Mervyn Morris, co-recipient of the 2021 Bocas Henry Swanzy Award, is a Jamaican poet and professor emeritus at UWI, Mona. He has championed Caribbean oral poetry traditions from early in his career. His 1964 essay “On Reading Louise Bennett, Seriously”, was a landmark in scholarly attention to the literature of Jamaican Patwa, which Morris extended […]
Kamau Brathwaite
The Barbadian writer, scholar, and editor Kamau Brathwaite, who passed away on February 4th at the age of 89, was a towering figure in Caribbean letters and culture for half a century. Dozens of contemporary Caribbean writers — of both poetry and prose — acknowledge him as an influence and a mentor. Just days before […]
Merle Hodge
Merle Hodge is a Trinidadian writer, author of the novels Crick Crack Monkey (1970) and The Life of Laetitia (1993), as well as co-facilitator of the Cropper Foundation Writers’ Workshop.
Ian Randle
Ian Randle, O.D., B.A. (Hons); MSc, LL.D. (Hon), recipient of the 2019 Bocas Henry Swanzy Award, is Chairman of Ian Randle Publishers Limited, which he founded in 1990, now recognized regionally and internationally as one of the leading publishers of books on and about the Caribbean. Ian Randle has over 45 years experience as a […]
Margaret Busby
Margaret Busby CBE, Hon. FRSL, editor, broadcaster and writer, was born in Ghana and educated in the UK. She became Britain’s youngest and first black woman publisher when in 1967 she co-founded Allison & Busby, of which she was editorial director for 20 years. She edited the pioneering anthology Daughters of Africa (1992), and 2019’s follow-up, […]
Gordon Rohlehr
Gordon Rohlehr, Guyana-born literary scholar long based in Trinidad, is Emeritus Professor at UWI, St. Augustine. His books include Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad (1990), My Strangled City and Other Essays (1992), The Shape of That Hurt and Other Essays (1992), and A Scuffling of Islands: Essays on Calypso (2004), Perfected Fables Now: A […]
Ken Ramchand
Ken Ramchand, distinguished literary critic, is the author of the seminal study The West Indian Novel and Its Background. He is Professor Emeritus of West Indian literature at the University of West Indies and a former President of the University of Trinidad and Tobago. In 2014, he received the Bocas Henry Swanzy Award for his […]
Jeremy Poynting
Jeremy Poynting is the founder of Peepal Tree Press based in the UK, the leading publisher of contemporary Caribbean writing. As a literary critic he has published widely in journals such as The New Voices and Journal of Commonwealth Literature on the topic of Indo-Caribbean literature. He is the recipient of the 2016 Bocas Henry […]
Edward Baugh
Edward Baugh, is Professor Emeritus of English, UWI, Mona. His scholarly and critical publications on West Indian literature include: Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision (Longman, 1978), Derek Walcott (Cambridge, 2006) and Frank Collymore: a Biography (Ian Randle, 2009). His three collections of poetry include, most recently, Black Sand: New and Selected Poems (Peepal Tree, 2013). Based at the Cave […]
Funso Aiyejina
Funso Aiyejina is the former Deputy Festival Director of the NGC Bocas Lit Fest and a former member of the board of directors of the Bocas Lit Fest. He is the former Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Education at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine and now Professor Emeritus. He is […]