2025 Festival Schedule
What creative instruments does nature give us, to shape and reflect on the world we inhabit? Guide your environmentally informed writing, in any genre, to its next level in the company of two celebrated and award-winning UK-based poets and nonfiction writers. In partnership with the British Council.
2025 Festival Schedule
This event is fully subscribed. Celebrating T&T’s iconic writer through words, music, and art. Author of classic novels including The Dragon Can’t Dance, Salt, and Is Just a Movie, Earl Lovelace is an international literary icon. In the year of his 90th birthday, we consider and celebrate his literary career at this special event. In […]
2025 Festival Schedule
Featuring an incredible lineup of LGBTQI+ writers and performers — including Andre Bagoo, Angelique V. Nixon, Daniel Blaze, Deneka Thomas, earth, Shivanee Ramlochan, and Tamara Ali, as well as BackChat Visiting Writer Lesley-Ann Wanliss and special guest writers Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Linzey Corridon. Join us for an evening of Caribbean queer resilience and talent […]
2025 Festival Schedule
The Bocas Lit Fest is back, for our landmark 15th year! As we kick off at the National Library, Festival Director Nicholas Laughlin tells us what to expect, and spoken word poet Shakira Burton — last year’s First Citizens National Poetry Slam champion — gets us alert and ready with a high-energy reflection on how […]
2025 Festival Schedule
Our series of free seminars for early-career and self-published authors returns, covering crucial aspects of the book business and tips to unlock your creativity. • Author Caroline Mackenzie on when to let go of your work in progress — how to tell if it’s ready to go to an editor or agent, or if it’s […]
2025 Festival Schedule
A special interactive workshop for teen poets! Poetry is a direct line to the human head and heart, whether written for the page or for performance. Guyana Prize-winning author Berkley Wendell Semple will help bring your drafts soaring to life, ready to express your verses as only you can. Requires registration via schools. In partnership […]
2025 Festival Schedule
Join one of the Caribbean’s most esteemed authors — writer of fiction, poetry, and history — as she discusses and reads from her work. Olive Senior talks to Amílcar Peter Sanatan, in this special event open to all, but aimed at secondary school students. In partnership with the JB Fernandes Memorial Trust.
2025 Festival Schedule
A special interactive workshop for teen writers! Nailah Folami Imoja, winner of Barbados’s 2025 Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Competition, reads from her YA novel Jamaica’s Exam, followed by a hands-on session exploring how to turn the adventures and frustrations of teenage life into a literary narrative. Writing is a great tool for figuring yourself out! […]
2025 Festival Schedule
Experience the magic of Carnival through theatre! In this electrifying showcase, young performers from the We Lit Carnival Theatre Workshop bring T&T’s festival traditions to life with music, traditional characters, and powerful storytelling. Directed by veteran theatre producer Ellen O’Malley Camps, these talented young actors will take you on a journey of mas, movement, and […]
2025 Festival Schedule
A special interactive workshop for teen fiction writers! A strong short story has the power to open worlds of imagination, to spark lively debates — so how do you get your own prose out of the starting block? Justin Haynes, the author of the new novel Ibis, shares pathways to harnessing your fiction’s ultimate powers. […]
2025 Festival Schedule
One of our most popular events for youth is back! Two teams of razor-sharp debaters square off over a perennial question: can T&T’s brightest, most ambitious young people fulfil their potential at home, or is migration for education or other opportunities inevitable? In partnership with the JB Fernandes Memorial Trust and the Trinidad and Tobago […]
2025 Festival Schedule
Our series of seminars for budding and self-published authors continues: • Author and columnist Ira Mathur on literary journalism, criticism, and how to get your book noticed in the press • Cindy Allman, star book influencer, on how to use Instagram and other online tools to build an avid readership
2025 Festival Schedule
Join us for the official launch of Project Fusion Junction, a multimedia, transnational project bringing together fifteen teens each from Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and Northern Ireland to collaborate physically and virtually, resulting in an online and printed graphic novel based on a common theme. Featuring Kevan Calliste, who will perform and lead an exciting […]
2025 Festival Schedule
Historical fiction takes the facts of the past — distant or recent — and reimagines them, to bring forgotten stories back to light. Ranging in timescale from the 19th century to the early 20th, recent fiction by Lisa Allen-Agostini (Death in the Dry River) and Kai Thomas (In the Upper Country) demonstrates the transformative power […]
2025 Festival Schedule
How do contemporary geopolitics — and the agendas of global leaders — redefine “home”? Up for debate are urgent questions of citizenship, who the state includes and excludes, (armed) borders, the fate of refugees, threats to national sovereignty, and redefinitions of human rights. What does this all mean for vulnerable small Caribbean states, and our […]
2025 Festival Schedule
In her book The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men (2023), artist and writer Catherine Lord explores personal and collective memory and the legacies of colonial history, through an innovative series of images and texts that subvert the century-old commonplace book of a plantation owner in Dominica. In conversation with Melanie Archer
2025 Festival Schedule
Awarded for the first time in 2011, the OCM Bocas Prize has helped raise the global profile of Caribbean writing. Join us for a celebration of the 14 extraordinary books of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction which have won the overall prize to date — brought to life through drama and music, directed by elisha […]
2025 Festival Schedule
In their writings about rural Jamaica — its people, landscapes, and overlooked histories — Jason Allen-Paisant and Erna Brodber show how the personal and the communal are deeply interlinked, and how what may seem like obscure local stories, whether in Woodside or Coffee Grove, are shaped by, but also help shape, bigger narratives. In conversation […]
2025 Festival Schedule
The old saying claims “there’s no place like home” — but “home” isn’t always a straightforward matter in recent fiction by T&T authors Ryan Bachoo (An Unending Search), Kavita Ganness (The Aloo-Pie Man and Other Stories), and V. Ramsamooj Gosine (Sonia). In conversation with Vindhar Suraj.
2025 Festival Schedule
What responsibilities do we have to key figures, living or dead, as we strive to capture their essence? What about when the subject is our own selves? Nicholas Boggs, author of the hotly-anticipated biography Baldwin: A Love Story, guides you through the art of writing real lives, and turning the dry facts and dates of […]
2025 Festival Schedule
A special showcase of recently published books by T&T authors, exploring a diversity of voices, subjects, and styles. Featuring Joel Frederick, Ayana K.S.L. John, Otancia Noel, and Ved Valmiki. Introduced by June Aming
2025 Festival Schedule
In their ambitious, arresting debut novels, Justin Haynes (Ibis) and Berkley Wendell Semple (Kipling Plass) weave complex coming-of-age stories in Caribbean communities under pressure. From Guyana in the violent waning years of the 1970s to Trinidad across generations, these novels subvert comfortable ideas about place, time, and belonging. In conversation with Camille Hernández-Ramdwar.
2025 Festival Schedule
Join us for our signature Stand & Deliver Saturday open mic event, hosted by Jayron Remy. This special edition features acclaimed writer Nailah Folami Imoja, winner of Barbados’s 2025 Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Competition. 🎤 Want to take the mic? If you’d like to share your work during the open mic, please register here to […]
2025 Festival Schedule
Poets Andre Bagoo (Midnight Bestiaries) and Linzey Corridon (West of West Indian) explore questions of the public and the private, the human and the animal, and the concurrent dangers and delights of intimacy in their new books. In conversation with Yesha Townsend
2025 Festival Schedule
In their latest poetry collections, Anthony Vahni Capildeo (Polkadot Wounds) and Lawrence Scott (Looking for Cazabon) explore journeys through landscapes of memory, history, and longing.
2025 Festival Schedule
The new anthology Writing For Our Lives, commissioned by The Cropper Foundation and published by Peekash Press, is a powerful collection of stories, poems, and essays that bring the climate crisis into sharp focus through the voices of those most affected yet least heard — the people and communities of the Caribbean. Co-editors Diana McCaulay […]
2025 Festival Schedule
A festival fixture returns: members of the Writers Union of T&T share their latest work and offer a snapshot of current directions in contemporary Caribbean writing, with special guests Anthony Joseph and Yvonne Weekes
2025 Festival Schedule
Ideas meet costumes and performance in T&T’s traditional protest masquerade, interpreting the theme “Always Coming Home” — plus two of T&T’s wittiest calypsonians, Black Sage and Dion Diaz, face off in the ever-popular Extempo Debate! In partnership with the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and the Arts and the National Carnival Commission
2025 Festival Schedule
The festival’s centrepiece awards ceremony recognises the past year’s best books of poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction, and the winner of this year’s award for distinguished service to Caribbean letters.
2025 Festival Schedule
In her new novel A House for Miss Pauline, Diana McCaulay brings to life a 99-year-old Jamaican woman whose house in rural Mason Hall conceals many secrets — from the distant and the not-too-distant past. Can Miss Pauline make peace with this troubling history before she passes on? In conversation with Cindy Allman
2025 Festival Schedule
Our celebration of the iconic writer’s 90th birthday continues with screenings of two film adaptations of his short fiction, both directed by his daughter Asha Lovelace. In the short film George and the Bicycle Pump, the idealistic George does not want to agree with his wife that his missing bicycle pump could be the work […]
2025 Festival Schedule
If you were going to name the world anew, how would you do it? The late Guyanese poet Martin Carter longed for freedom to write a “happier alphabet”. Come and create individual and collective alphabets of freedom with the award-winning poet Anthony Vahni Capildeo, author of Polkadot Wounds. Explore alphabet sequence forms like the abecedarian. […]
2025 Festival Schedule
Concepts of “arrival” and “survival” — through reading and writing, imagining and making — are celebrated and interrogated in the latest books by Kevin Adonis Browne (A Sense of Arrival) and Alexis Pauline Gumbs (Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde). Innovative in form, these books ask penetrating questions about the meanings […]
2025 Festival Schedule
Our signature Stand & Deliver open mic event returns this Sunday, hosted by Jayron Remy. This edition features the talented Yesha Townsend as our special guest reader. 🎤 Want to take the mic? If you’d like to share your work during the open mic, please register here to secure your spot. 📣 No registration required […]
2025 Festival Schedule
In 2025, for the first time, the Bocas Henry Swanzy Award for Distinguished Service to Caribbean Letters is presented not to an individual, but to an institution: the Journal of West Indian Literature, founded in 1986. How has the journal evolved over the past four decades, and what is its future intellectual role? Current co-editors-in-chief […]
2025 Festival Schedule
Landscapes and journeys both real and imagined, legends and the truest of true stories, unfurl in the poems of Anu Lakhan (The Proper Care of Knives) and Alycia Pirmohamed (Another Way to Split Water). Diverse in style and approach, these poets share an ardour for exploring what only poems can do. In conversation with Shivanee […]
2025 Festival Schedule
“History” — as a way of thinking and writing about the past — is inexhaustible, and we are surrounded by untold stories. For Richard Charan (The Village of One) and Debbie Jacob (Police Dogs of Trinidad and Tobago), personal memories and dedicated research come together in their books that chart both individual stories and bigger […]
2025 Festival Schedule
Whether recent or ancient, the past keeps a profound hold on our writing lives. Join Trinidadian-Canadian Kai Thomas, author of the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize-winning novel In the Upper Country, in tackling the thorny sites of memory that inform short stories and novels in progress, and learn how to use the literary imagination […]
2025 Festival Schedule
How has the work of Earl Lovelace shaped subsequent generation of Caribbean authors? Some of our most acclaimed contemporary writers discuss how the novels and stories of T&T’s beloved icon have shaped their own writing and thought. With Lisa Allen-Agostini, Marlon James, and Anthony Joseph, in conversation with Gabrielle Hosein
2025 Festival Schedule
In almost every generation of T&T’s history, ordinary people have organised forms of resistance to oppressive authority that have shaped our national self-determination. Why have so few of these stories been told? Indigenous activist Tracy Assing, researcher Satnarine Balkaransingh (Hosay Caribbean), and former Black Power revolutionary Andrea Jacob (From Freedom Fighter to True Liberation) offer […]
2025 Festival Schedule
The problems of belonging, alienation, and reconciliation are at the heart of the works of Antonio Michael Downing (Saga Boy) and Yomi Ṣode (Manorism). Writing across memoir and formally innovative poetry, these authors explore how the pressures of history, ancestry, and race shape individual possibilities. In conversation with Alake Pilgrim. In partnership with the British […]
2025 Festival Schedule
Few public figures are under more intense scrutiny than politicians — yet how well do we really understand their motives and ambitions, and the way private lives shape public personas and policies? In their respective biographies of T&T Prime Minister Patrick Manning and Guyanese President Janet Jagan, scholars Bridget Brereton and Patricia Mohammed bring formidable […]
2025 Festival Schedule
Presenting two hotly anticipated new novels by past winners of the OCM Bocas Prize! Set centuries apart, and epic in both scope and ambition, Olive Senior’s Paradise Once and Celeste Mohammed’s Ever Since We Small make their world debuts at the 2025 Bocas Lit Fest. The authors join host Lisa Outar for a conversation about […]
2025 Festival Schedule
It’s the year’s biggest night of poetry, as T&T’s top performance poets vie for the championship and the first prize of TT$50,000 — with the hard-hitting theme Bring It Home. Fourteen finalists have advanced to Grand Slam with hopes of dethroning Defending Champion, Shakira Burton for the 2025 Grand Slam title and $50,000 CASH courtesy […]