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 […]
Shivanee Ramlochan
Shivanee Ramlochan’s first book of poems, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (Peepal Tree Press, 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 People’s Choice T&T Book of the Year, and shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Shivanee was shortlisted for the 2018 Bridport Prize for Poetry. “The Red Thread Cycle”, […]
Mandisa Pantin
Mandisa Pantin, writer, film producer and director, and has been the script supervisor on three award winning films, Jab in Dark, 2013, Pan! Our Musical Odyessy, 2014 and Sally’s Way, 2015. She is currently working on a biodocumentary of her father, the late Raoul Pantin, writer and journalist.
Kei Miller
Kei Miller, Jamaican born poet, novelist, essayist and blogger won the 2014 OCM Bocas non-fiction Prize and his Augustown, is the fiction winner of the 2017 OCM Bocas Prize for fiction. His The Cartographer Tries to Map A Way to Zion won the 2014 Forward Prize for the best poetry collection and was shortlisted in […]
Sharon Millar
Sharon Millar was born and lives in Trinidad. She is the winner of the 2013 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the 2012 Small Axe Short Fiction Award. Her first collection The Whale House and other stories (Peepal Tree Press 2015) was long-listed for the 2016 OCM Bocas Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Pepperpot: Best New […]
Sunity Maharaj
Sunity Maharaj runs her own multi-media production and consulting company. She is the Managing Director of the Lloyd Best Institute of the West Indies and is a senior career journalist
Earl Lovelace
Earl Lovelace is a Trinidadian writer. His books include the Caribbean classic The Dragon Can’t Dance, and Salt, winner of the 1997 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. His novel Is Just a Movie won the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and the Grand Prize for Caribbean Literature from the Regional Council of Guadeloupe. He was […]
Karen Lord
Barbadian writer Dr. Karen Lord is the author, most recently, of The Blue, Beautiful World, longlisted for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Redemption in Indigo, which won the William L. Crawford Award and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. Her other works include […]
Louis Lee Sing
Louis Lee Sing, was the Mayor of Port of Spain 2010-2013. His memoir, a document of that office, Local Government in Trinidad — Conspiracy Against the People was published in 2014 by Lee Sing Arts. His most recent book is the novel Between the Bank and the Gutter.
Barbara Lalla
Novelist Barbara Lalla is Professor Emerita, Language and Literature at The University of the West Indies, St Augustine. She is the author of five novels, including By Such a Parting Light, published in 2024. Her numerous scholarly works include Postcolonialisms: Caribbean Rereading of Medieval English Discourse, Defining Jamaican Fiction: Marronage and the Discourse of Survival, […]
Ria Julien
Ria Julien, a NY based Trinidadian, is a literary agent with Frances Goldin Literary Agency in New York City. The boutique agency specialises in literary fiction and non-fiction, especially books with a progressive political orientation. She is a member of the fiction panel of judges of the OCM Bocas prize 2015.
Debbie Jacob
Debbie Jacob is an award-winning journalist, author, librarian, and prison reform activist, whose career spans over three decades and books such as Wishing for Wings and Making Waves: How the West Indies Shaped the United States.
Nalo Hopkinson
Nalo Hopkinson was born in Jamaica. She lived in Jamaica, Guyana, the US and Trinidad before moving to Canada as a teenager. She has published six novels and numerous short stories. Her first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, won the Warner Aspect First Novel contest. She has also received the Campbell and Locus Awards, […]
Nnamdi Hodge
Nnamdi Hodge, is a Trinidadian language teacher, researcher and writer, co-producer of Vini Chante an Patois—Come sing in Patois, a bilingual songbook and CD compilation of local patois songs.
Daniel Hahn
Daniel Hahn, is an award-winning translator, writer and editor, with some forty books to his name. His most recent books include the new Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature and a translation of an Angolan novel. He is the chair of the UK writers’ union, the Society of Authors.
Jocelyne Guilbault
Jocelyne Guilbault, is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Music Department of the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Governing Sound: The Cultural Politics of Trinidad’s Carnival Musics and Zouk: World Music in the West Indies. She is co-author of Roy Cape: A Life on the Calypso and Soca Banstand.
Baroness Susan Greenfield
Baroness Susan Greenfield, is a leading British scientist, writer and broadcaster and a Senior Research Fellow at Lincoln College. Her research explores how the 21st century environment affects brain development, a subject explored in her latest book Mind Change: How digital technologies are leaving their mark on our brains.
Kenneth ‘Ken’ Gordon
Kenneth ‘Ken’ Gordon, former broadcaster, media entrepreneur, captain of industry, senator, Chairman of the West Indies Cricket Board and Chairman of the Integrity Commision, Trinidad and Tobago, his 1999 memoir, Getting it Write: Winning Caribbean Press Freedom, was published by Ian Randle Publishers.
Danielle Delon
Danielle Delon, Director of the NGC Children’s Bocas Lit Fest, is an author, editor and publisher. Her books include Bridges of Trinidad and Tobago: Side to Side and The Letters of Margaret Mann.
Jo-Anne Ferreira
Jo-Anne Ferreira, is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus. Her research interests include the history of Portuguese language and culture in the Caribbean and South American French Creole varieties (Trinidadian, Venezuela and Brazilian).
Alvin Daniell
Alvin Daniell, is the composer of several Trinidad and Tobago hit calypsos, an arts television presenter and well known adjudicator of calypso, steelpan and singing competitions throughout the Caribbean.
Carolyn Cooper
Carolyn Cooper, Professor Emerita, UWI, Mona, Jamaica. She is the author of two influential books on Jamaican popular culture, Sound Clash (2004) and Noises in the Blood (1993), and the editor of Global Reggae (2012). She is a broadcaster, Jamaica Gleaner columnist and chaired the non-fiction panel of the OCM Bocas Prize 2015.
Roy Cape
Roy Cape, born in Trinidad in 1942, is an internationally renowned calypso and soca musician and bandleader. He has toured widely, played on hundreds of recordings, and released eight albums with his band Roy Cape All Stars. He is co-author of his biography, Roy Cape: A Life on the Calypso and Soca Bandstand.
Tobias S. Buckell
Born in the Caribbean, Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times bestselling and World Fantasy Award-winning author. His novels and almost one hundred stories have been translated into nineteen different languages. He has been nominated for the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, World Fantasy Award, and Astounding Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. He […]
Bridget Brereton
Bridget Brereton is Professor Emerita of history at UWI, St. Augustine, and author of Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad and A History of Modern Trinidad, among other books. She was chair of the non-fiction judging panel for the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize in 2011, and again in 2020.
Laurence Breiner
Laurence Breiner is Professor of English at Boston University. Author of An Introduction to West Indian Poetry and Black Yeats: Eric Roach and the Politics of Caribbean Poetry as well as numerous articles and reviews on Caribbean literature, he is currently working on Jamaican performance poetry. He chaired the poetry panel of the 2020 OCM […]
Shane Book
Shane Book, Canadian poet and filmmaker of Trinidadian descent, is a graduate of New York University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He was awarded the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. His most recent poetry collection is Congotronics.
Rhoda Bharath
Rhoda Bharath is a Trinidadian writer, teacher, and political and cultural blogger. Her debut book The Ten Day’s Executive and Other Stories was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2015.
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 […]