Ramesh Deosaran
Ramesh Deosaran ORTT, Professor Emeritus, is a former Independent Senator and distinguished holder of public office in Trinidad and Tobago where he founded The Caribbean Journal of Criminology and Social Psychology. His dozen publications include Inequality, Crime and Education in Trinidad and Tobago: Removing the Masks (2016).
Andy Johnson
Andy Johnson is a senior journalist who has held various positions in Trinidad and Tobago’s print and electronic media. He was the founding President of the Media Association of Trinidad and Tobago, MATT.
Asha Javeed
Asha Javeed is a senior journalist at the Trinidad and Tobago Express.
David Abdulah
David Abdulah is a senior labour leader in Trinidad and Tobago and former General Secretary of the Oilfield Workers’ Trade Union.
Eliot Weinberger
Eliot Weinberger is a contemporary American writer, essayist, editor, and translator whose writing regularly features in the New York Review of Books and has appeared in over thirty languages. His numerous books include An Elemental Thing (2007) and The Ghosts of Birds (2016). He first gained recognition for his translations of the Nobel Prize–winning writer and […]
Brenda Hughes
Brenda Hughes, the director of our Festival drama readings, is Artistic Director of the Monkey Mountain theatre production company. She has produced and directed plays by Derek Walcott, Trevor Rhone, Ronald Amoroso, Roderick Walcott, and August Strindberg. Trained in acting at Shakespeare and Company, The Mount, Lenox, Massachusetts, she has co-created/created roles in some classic […]
Godfrey P. Smith
Godfrey Smith is the author of The Assassination of Maurice Bishop, published by Ian Randle Publishers in Jamaica. He is an attorney at law, a retired politician, former Attorney General of Belize, and a successful biographer. His George Price: A Life Revealed, won the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature non fiction. The Biography of Michael Manley was published in 2016.
Nigel Scott
Nigel Scott’s 50-year acting career includes leading roles in Walcott’s the Joker of Seville, Pantomime and O Starry, Starry Night. He has played singing roles in Camelot and the Sound of Music. His producer credits include Mantalk and The Last of the Redmen, both Cacique winners for Best Production. Scott is also one of T&T’s leading […]
Gilberte O’Sullivan
Gilberte O’Sullivan is a Trinidadian poet, featured in the “Who’s Next?” lineup of emerging writers at Bocas 2014. Her work is published in the anthology She Sex: Poetry & Prose.
Richard Georges
Richard Georges is a writer of essays, fiction, and three collections of poetry. His most recent book, Epiphaneia (2019), won the 2020 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and his first book, Make Us All Islands (2017), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. His second book, Giant (2018), was highly commended by the Forward Prizes and […]
Ira Mathur
Ira Mathur is an award-winning India-born Trinidadian multimedia journalist. Her memoir Love the Dark Days (Peepal Tree Press) was the winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction, and shortlisted for the overall prize. It was also named as among the best biographies of 2022 by the UK Guardian. In 2021 she was longlisted […]
Anthony Joseph
Anthony Joseph is an award-winning Trinidad-born poet, novelist, academic, and musician. His latest poetry collection, Sonnets for Albert, was the winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry. It previously won the 2022 T.S. Eliot Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2022 Forward Prize for Best Collection. He is the author of four other […]
Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson is an international journalist who has been based in Port of Spain for 25 years. He writes for The Economist and the Economist Intelligence Unit, has a weekly column in the Trinidad Express, and has written several Caribbean texts for Oxford University Press. He also lectures in Global Media and other areas of […]
Gabrielle Hosein
Gabrielle Hosein is a Lecturer at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, UWI, St. Augustine. She has been involved in Caribbean feminist movement building for two decades.
Derrick Sharbodie
Inspector Derrick Sharbodie, a police officer since 1989, is the founder of St James Police Youth Club for at-risk youth. In 2011 he was awarded a national award, the Chaconia Medal, for public service.
Jennifer Rahim
Jennifer Rahim is a widely published poet, fiction writer and literary critic. She co-edited and introduced two collections of essays, Beyond Borders: Cross-Culturalism and the Caribbean Canon (2009) and Created in the West Indies: Caribbean Perspectives on V.S. Naipaul (2011). Her poetry collection Approaching Sabbaths (2009) was awarded a 2010 Casa de las Américas Prize. […]
Annalee Davis
Annalee Davis is a Visual Artist who works with post-plantation economies and engages with the land where she lives. Her solo exhibition, ‘This Ground Beneath My Feet – A Chorus of Bush in Rab Lands’ was curated by Holly Bynoe and shown at the Idea Lab, the Warfield Center in Austin, Texas. The catalogue was […]
Janilla Carrington
Janilla Carrington is a paper recycling teacher at the National Centre for Persons with Disabilities.
Thackwray “Dax” Driver
Dr. Thackwray “Dax” Driver has been the chief executive officer of the Energy Chamber for the past twelve years. During this time, he has overseen the transformation of the South Trinidad Chamber into the Energy Chamber of Trinidad and Tobago. He has pioneered numerous new initiatives and activities for the Energy Chamber, including the Safe […]
Gregory Sloane-Seale
Gregory Sloane-Seale has been working with and on behalf of “at risk” youth at a community level for over 20 years. He is the national coordinator of the Citizen Security Programme in the Ministry of National Security which has as one of its main objectives the reduction in levels of crime and violence in specific […]
Kwynn Johnson
Dr Kwynn Johnson is a Trinidadian artist and a Haitian Studies Scholar. At this year’s NGC Bocas Lit Fest, she is premiering a 30-ft drawing titled Place as Palimpsest. She has been working on this drawing for the past 3 years. It will also be featured in a series of forthcoming shows in Trinidad, Haiti […]
Wesley Gibbings
Wesley Gibbings is an award-winning Trinidadian journalist and press freedom advocate who has covered Caribbean public affairs for over 30 years and has written extensively on journalism and media in the West Indies.
Felicia Chang
Felicia Chang is the Co-Founder of Plantain, a company whose mission is to inspire everyone to want to tell their story. After her training in pure and social sciences she worked on research and development projects in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and North America. This shaped her belief that we can create more compassionate societies through a better understanding […]
Peter Kimani
Peter Kimani is a Kenyan novelist and journalist based in Nairobi, where he teaches at Aga Khan University’s Graduate School of Media and Communications. Dance of the Jakaranda, a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, is his third novel.
Rajiv Mohabir
Rajiv Mohabir is the translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (2019) and author of The Cowherd’s Son (2017), winner of the Kundiman Prize, and The Taxidermist’s Cut (2016), winner of the Intro Prize in Poetry Four Way Books. www.rajivmohabir.com/
Ishion Hutchinson
Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of two poetry collections, House of Lords and Commons (2016), and his first collection, Far District (2010). Since his first publication, Hutchinson has been the recipient of numerous awards and honours including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (2016). His works have appeared in several anthologies and journals, including […]
Marcia Douglas
Marcia Douglas is the author of the novels The Marvellous Equations of the Dread, Madam Fate and Notes from a Writer’s Book of Cures and Spells as well as a poetry collection, Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a U.K. Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The […]
Nathalie Taghaboni
Nathalie Taghaboni is the author of The Savanoy Series. Born in Port of Spain, raised in Toronto, she now resides in the US. She is the CEO of the independent, publishing company, Commess University (Press). Her professional writing began in 2001 as a columnist for the SHARE Caribbean newspaper. She has also written for the […]
Philip Nanton
Philip Nanton, author of Canouan Suite and Other Pieces (2016), a work of literary non-fiction, Frontiers of the Caribbean (2017) and Island Voices from St. Christopher and the Barracudas (2014), is a performance artist and writer from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, living in Barbados. His most recent publication is Riff: The Shake Keane Story […]
Nicole Dennis-Benn
Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of the highly acclaimed debut novel, HERE COMES THE SUN (Norton/Liveright, July 2016), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a NPR Best Books of 2016, an Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Entertainment Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2016, a BuzzFeed Best Literary Debuts of 2016, among […]