Oonya Kempadoo
Resident in Grenada and Canada, Oonya Kempadoo was brought up in Guyana, has lived in Europe and worked for most of her life in various Caribbean islands. She is author of Buxton Spice and Tide Running, winner of the Casa de las Américas Literary Prize for best English or Creole novel, and All Decent Animals. […]
NoViolet Bulawayo
NoViolet Bulawayo is a Zimbabwean author. Her novel We Need New Names was shortlisted for the Etisalat Prize for Literature and the Man Booker Prize, making her the first black African woman to be shortlisted for the award. She is now a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
Nicha Selvon-Ramkissoon
Nicha Selvon-Ramkissoon is a Trinidadian literary scholar, currently based at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine.
Neil Bissoondath
Neil Bissoondath is a Trinidadian writer based in Canada where he now teaches Creative Writing at Université Laval. In 1986 he won the McClelland and Stewart award and the National Magazine award for his short story Dancing. In 2010 he was made a Chevalier of the Ordre national du Québec.
Michael A. Bucknor
Michael A. Bucknor is Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Global Studies and Decolonial Practice in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He previously taught at the University of the West Indies (UWI) Mona Campus in Jamaica, where he was the Chair of the Department of […]
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 […]
Martin Daly
Martin Daly, SC, is a Senior Counsel of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago and a former senator. His weekly column in the Trinidad Express focused on current affairs, with emphasis on the importance of art and culture to the well being of the society.
Marsha Pearce
Marsha Pearce is a cultural studies scholar from Trinidad and Tobago.
Marion Bethel
Marion Bethel is a Bahamian poet. She was awarded the Casa de las Américas Prize for her poetry collection Guanahani, My Love in 1995. She was the chair of the poetry judges for the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize.
Malika Booker
Malika Booker is a British writer of Guyanese and Grenadian parentage. She is co-founder of Malika’s kitchen, a writer’s collective based in London, Chicago and New York. She was the first Poet in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her first collection, Pepper Seed, was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. She won the […]
Malachi McIntosh
Malachi McIntosh is Editor and Publishing director of Wasafiri. He previously co-led the Runnymede Trust’s award-winning Our Migration Story project and spent four years as a lecturer in postcolonial literature at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Emigration and Caribbean Literature (2015) and the editor of Beyond Calypso: Re-Reading Samuel Selvon (2016). […]
Linton Kwesi Johnson
Linton Kwesi Johnson is a Jamaican poet who revolutionized literary English with his electrifying fusion of oral verse, Jamaican Creole, radical politics and dub rhythms. In 1981 he founded his own record label, LKJ, and in 2002 he became the second living poet and the only black poet to be published in the Penguin Modern […]
Kwame Dawes
Kwame Dawes is a Ghanaian-born Jamaican writer who has published numerous poetry collections. In 2011 he was awarded the Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers Award in recognition of his generosity to other writers and the broader literary community. He is director of the Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica and founder of the South […]
Kurtis Gross
Kellie Magnus
Kellie Magnus is a writer and development consultant from Kingston, Jamaica. Kellie’s passions are creativity and philanthropy. She is the Executive Director of the Caribbean Culture Fund, which supports Caribbean creatives and cultural organisations. Her non-fiction writing has appeared in local and regional publications, and she has authored more than 15 children’s books, several of […]
Keith Gray
Keith Gray, critically acclaimed British author, writes coming of age novels for young adults and children. He has written more than ten books including Warehouse, shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Award and winner of the Angus Book Award; Marlarkey, shortlisted for the Booktrust Teenage Prize and winner of the South Lanarkshire Book Award; and Ostrich […]
Kaie Kellough
Kaie Kellough is a novelist, poet, and sound performer. His work emerges at a crossroads of social engagement and formal experiment. He lives in Montréal and has roots in Guyana, South America. His last book of poetry, Magnetic Equator (McClelland and Stewart, 2019) won the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize. His collection of short stories, Dominoes […]
Johnny Stollmeyer
John Cowley
John Cowley is a Carnival and music researcher, and the author of Carnival, Canboulay and Calypso, the seminal history of Trinidad and Tobago Carnival.
Joanne Hillhouse
Joanne Hillhouse is a cross genre writer, writing coach and book blogger from Antigua and Barbuda. Her children’s stories include Lost! A Caribbean Sea Adventure and With Grace. Her YA novel Musical Youth won a CODE Burt Award and is on the Caribbean Schools reading list. She is the force behind the Wadadli Pen project, […]
Jackie Hinkson
Jackie Hinkson is a prominent Trinidadian artist. What Things Are True, his autobiography, was published in 2012 to accompany a retrospective of his work at the National Museum and Art Gallery in Port of Spain.
Irvine Welsh
Irvine Welsh is a Scottish novelist who shot to fame in 1993 with his bestselling debut novel Trainspotting, later made into a film of the same name. https://www.irvinewelsh.net/
Ifeona Fulani
Ifeona Fulani is a Jamaican writer, currently teaching at New York University. She is the author of numerous scholarly articles, the novel Seasons of Dust and the short story collection Ten Days in Jamaica.
Ian Robertson
Ian Robertson is Professor of Psychology at Trinity College, Dublin, where he was founding director of the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience. He has more than two hundred published books and articles in this field. He presented the NGC Bocas Lit Fest Big Ideas lecture in 2013 on his book The Winner Effect: How Power […]
Ian McDonald
Ian McDonald, born in Trinidad and based in Guyana, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1969, McDonald’s novel, The Hummingbird Tree was published to great acclaim and was later made into a BBC film. He has also published five collections of poetry.
Helen Drayton
Helen Drayton is a writer, poet, artist, lecturer, and former independent senator in the parliament of Trinidad and Tobago.
Giselle Rampaul
Giselle Rampaul was a Trinidadian literary scholar at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. She was the founder and producer of The Spaces Between Words podcast
George Lamming
George Lamming is a Barbadian writer, one of the Caribbean’s most distinguished literary figures. He is the author of such classic works as In the Castle of My Skin (1953), The Emigrants (1954), and The Pleasures of Exile (1960). He was chief judge of the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize.
Gaiutra Bahadur
Gaiutra Bahadur is a Guyanese-American essayist, critic and journalist who writes frequently about literature, history, memory, migration, and gender. Her book Coolie Woman, a personal history of indenture, was shortlisted in 2014 for the Orwell Prize, the British literary prize for artful political writing, and the OCM Bocas nonfiction prize. A former daily newspaper reporter […]
Frank Birbalsingh
Frank Birbalsingh is a Guyanese literary scholar. He has written extensively on Caribbean literature, and is professor emeritus at York University in Toronto. He is chair of the non-fiction judges for the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize.