Grace Achoy
Grace Achoy is a Trinidadian librarian whose love of reading and passion for her heritage led to the creation of The Black Lake, which is loosely based on an Amerindian folklore about the Pitch Lake in La Brea. She lives in San Fernando.
Tiphanie Yanique
Tiphanie Yanique is the author of the poetry collection, Wife, which won the 2016 Forward/Felix Dennis Prize for a First Collection and the 2016 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry. Tiphanie is also the author of the novel, Land of Love and Drowning, which won the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award from the Center for Fiction, […]
Derek Walcott, OBE
Derek Walcott, OBE, is a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, writer and visual artist. He is the recipient of numerous honours and awards, including the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1992, the Mac Arthur Foundation Fellowship, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize, 2011 for his collection of poems White Egrets, and the T. S. Eliot Prize.
Daniela Tramacere
Daniela Tramacere, Italian national and macro economist, is Chargé d`Affaires of the EU Delegation to Trinidad and Tobago. With long-standing experience in development cooperation and foreign relations, she has worked in Delhi, Buenos Aires and in Europe.
Bhaskar Sunkara
Bhaskar Sunkara, founding editor and publisher of Jacobin magazine, is a socialist political activist based in New York. He is a member of the non-fiction panel of the OCM Bocas Prize 2015.
Marjorie Thorpe
Marjorie Thorpe, is a former Campus and University Dean of the Faculty of Arts and General Studies at UWI, St. Augustine. From 1988 to 1992 she was Trinidad and Tobago’s ambassador to the United Nations. She was the Overall Vice-Chair of the OCM Bocas Prize from 2011 – 2016.
Johnny Temple
Johnny Temple is the publisher and editor in chief of Akashic Books, an award-winning Brooklyn-based independent company dedicated to publishing urban literary fiction and political nonfiction. Temple won the 2013 Ellery Queen Award; the American Association of Publishers’ 2005 Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing; and the 2010 Jay and Deen Kogan Award […]
Olive Senior
Olive Senior, Jamaica’s 2021-2024 Poet Laureate, is the award-winning author of 18 books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and children’s literature and other published work. Her many awards include Canada’s Writers Trust Matt Cohen Award for Lifetime Achievement, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, an honorary doctorate from the University of […]
Lawrence Scott
Lawrence Scott is a prize-winning writer from Trinidad & Tobago. He was awarded a Lifetime Literary award in 2012 by the National Library of Trinidad & Tobago for his significant contribution to the literature of Trinidad and Tobago. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2019. His new novel is […]
Brinsley Samaroo
Brinsley Samaroo, former Head of the History department at UWI, St. Augustine, has written extensively on the history of Trinidad and Tobago with a focus on working class movements, Indo-Caribbean history and political and institutional development. His most recent work is The Price of Conscience: Howard Noel Nankivell and Labour Unrest in the British Caribbean.
Silvio Torres-Saillant
Silvio Torres-Saillant, scholar, Dominican Republic born, is a Syracuse University English Professor and former lecturer at universities in Europe and Latin America. His books include Caribbean Poetics (2d. ed., Peepal Tree 2013). He is a member of the non-fiction panel of the OCM Bocas Prize 2015.
Monique Roffey
Monique Roffey, FRSL is an award winning Trinidadian-born, British writer of novels, essays, literary journalism and a memoir that have been translated into several languages. Her 2020 novel The Mermaid of Black Conch (Peepal Tree Press) won the Costa Book of the Year Award and was nominated for eight major awards. Her other Caribbean novels, […]
Colin Robinson
Colin Robinson has returned home to Trinidad and Tobago twice: from Leeds at age four, and from Brooklyn at forty-five. His debut poetry collection You Have You Father Hard Head was published in 2016.
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.
Shani Mootoo
Shani Mootoo, born in Dublin to Trinidadian parents, raised in Trinidad, and now based in Canada, is a novelist, poet, and visual artist. Her novels include Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab, longlisted for the Scotia Bank Giller Prize and shortlisted for the Lambda Award; Valmiki’s Daughter, longlisted for the Scotia Bank Giller Prize; He Drown She in the […]
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.