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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Beginning in Port-au-Prince in the 1940s, ranging across decades and continents, the novel Village Weavers by Myriam J.A. Chancy, winner of the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Fiction, explores connections and disconnections across lines of class and family, and how the effects of secrets, kept and revealed, extend across generations. In conversation with Denise deCaires […]
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
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
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
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
“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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 […]