Lance Dowrich
Lance Dowrich won the 2016 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the Caribbean with “Ethelbert and the Free Cheese”. His two books to date have been published by Notion Press of Chennai, India. These are: A Plethora of Dead Ends (July 2021) and Long Rope for Magga Goat (March 2026). His story from 2016 was part of The ImagiNation Project, published in South Africa, (2019). He has participated in the Dibrugarh University International Literary Festival, India, in March 2024; Bocas Lit Fest, Trinidad and Tobago, in 2016, 2017, and 2023; and the Calabash Literary Festival, Jamaica, in 2016.
Magdalene Abraha
Magdalene Abraha is a writer, cultural curator, and multi-award-winning publisher. A former Forbes 30 Under 30 awardee for her work in writing and publishing, she began her journalism career as one of the youngest-ever columnists for The Independent, where she covered politics, art, and popular culture. Since then, she has written for The Economist, The Guardian, VICE, i, Stylist, Vogue, and more. Abraha currently serves as Publishing Director at Jacaranda Books, having previously held senior editorial and publicity roles at major publishing houses including Bloomsbury and I.B. Tauris.
Margaret Busby
Margaret Busby CBE, Hon. FRSL, editor, broadcaster and writer, was born in Ghana and educated in the UK. She became Britain’s youngest and first black woman publisher when in 1967 she co-founded Allison & Busby, of which she was editorial director for 20 years. She edited the pioneering anthology Daughters of Africa (1992), and 2019’s follow-up, New Daughters of Africa.
She is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and recipient of multiple honorary doctorates and awards, including the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award, the Bocas Henry Swanzy Award, the Royal Society of Literature’s Benson Medal, and the Royal African Society’s inaugural Africa Writes Lifetime Achievement Award. Margaret Busby’s own collected writings, Part of the Story: Writings from Half a Century, will be published by Hamish Hamilton in March 2026.
Margaret McDowall-Thompson
A professional planner for over thirty-five years, Margaret McDowall-Thompson co-edited the National Physical Development Plan, created the National Housing Land Bank, participated in squatter regularisation, housing assistance programmes, urban redevelopment, vendor and maxi-taxi regularisation, planning and implementation of health, national security, community and commercial buildings in Trinidad and St. Lucia and municipal investment plans. She is a past General Manager of NIPDEC, executive member of the Citizens for Conservation and ICOMOS TT, a member of the Trinidad and Tobago Society of Planners and the Caribbean Planners Association. She is the past Chairman of the National Trust of Trinidad and Tobago.
Marguerite Joseph
Marguerite Joseph is a Saint Lucian author with more than thirty years of experience working across the Caribbean in personal, social, and community wellbeing. Her writing explores identity, silence, and the emotional lives shaped by Caribbean history and social realities. Drawing on her background in mental health and social care, her debut novel, Lady Under the Stairs, weaves psychological insight with historical and cultural storytelling while highlighting the unnecessary confinement and suffering of people living with mental illness. Through both her professional work and her fiction, Marguerite Joseph is deeply interested in how stories shape healing, meaning, and human connection.
Marina Salandy-Brown
Marina Salandy-Brown, Bocas Lit Fest founder and President, is a T&T Newsday columnist. Her writing has appeared in international journals and magazines and the New Daughters of Africa anthology (2019).
Mario Laarmann
Mario Laarmann is a cultural and literary scientist and a PhD candidate employed at the French Department of Saarland University, Germany. His doctoral research focuses on anglophone and francophone Caribbean literature in the light of the postcolonial present (David Scott). Research interests include cultural studies and comparative literature, anti-colonial theory, museums and collections, postmodernism and poststructuralism, black internationalism, and intersectional feminism in a comparative perspective (French, English, German, Spanish).
Photo © Maxime Gruss
Marsha Massiah
Marsha Massiah is the Founder and Executive Director of the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival (BCLF), the only U.S. literary festival dedicated exclusively to Caribbean literature and indigenous storytelling. Held each September, the BCLF has become a leading destination for Caribbean and diaspora writers, celebrating luminaries such as Jamaica Kincaid, Julia Alvarez, Lorna Goodison, and its patron and prize namesake, Dr Elizabeth Nunez. Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, Marsha credits her homeland with shaping her creative consciousness. As the festival’s chief visionary, she leads its programming, partnerships, and growth with a clear mission: to build a bridge for Caribbean stories and secure their rightful place in the global literary landscape.
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 Literatures in English and Public Orator for the Mona Campus, both for two terms. He is a former Chair of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS), currently serves on the editorial boards of several journals, and is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of West Indian Literature.
Motilal Boodoosingh
Motilal Boodoosingh is a short story writer. His stories have been published in several Caribbean magazines, and he has also published two volumes of short stories.
Muli Amaye
Muli Amaye is the author of A House With No Angels (Crocus, 2019). Her short fiction is published in many anthologies and journals. She is the Coordinator of the MFA Creative Writing Programme at The University of The West Indies, Trinidad. She has taught creative writing in education and the community for over 20 years. Her writing interests are in women’s voices, diaspora, displacement, migration and notions of home.
Nicholas Laughlin
Nicholas Laughlin is festival and programme director of the Bocas Lit Fest and the former editor of Caribbean Beat and The Caribbean Review of Books. He has published two books of poems,The Strange Years of My Life (2015) and Enemy Luck (2019), and a book of genre-fluid “microtexts”, Bird Machine (2024). He is editor of a collection of early essays by C.L.R. James, Letters from London (2003); a revised and expanded edition of V.S. Naipaul’s family correspondence, Letters Between a Father and Son (2009); and the anthology So Many Islands (2018). He is co-director of Alice Yard, a contemporary art collective based in Port of Spain.
Nicole Roberts
Nicole Roberts is a Senior Lecturer in Spanish at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. She is also a translator. She has published widely on race and ethnicity in the Hispanic Caribbean, and also on Hispanic-Caribbean literature, language and culture. Her most recent publication is the edited volume: Trinidad y Tobago/Cuba: Historia, Lengua y Literatura (2018) co-edited with Armando García de la Torre and Mauricio Núñez Rodríguez.
Nigel Campbell
Nigel Campbell is a well-known music industry analyst, commentator and reviewer who has documented Caribbean music culture and the business of music in print, television, and on the popular podcast Music Matters: The Caribbean Edition with entertainment journalist Laura Dowrich-Phillips (podcast.iradio.tt). His writing has appeared in the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian, Caribbean Beat and other publications and digital online platforms. In conjunction with expanding the appeal of island music globally via new media, live performances and distribution (iRADIO.tt), he publishes Jazz in the Islands magazine (jazz.tt), and produces concerts and music festivals including Jazz Artists on the Greens (jaotg.org).
Nirad Tewarie
Nirad Tewarie is the CEO of AMCHAM T&T. He is also the Chairman of San Juan Jabloteh Sports Club, and serves on a number of private sector Boards. He was formerly the CEO of the T&T Coalition of Services Industries (TTCSI) and a member of the Communications and Public Affairs Division of the Commonwealth Secretariat in London, UK. He has lectured in International Relations, Politics, English and Journalism at several tertiary institutions. He holds a BSc. in Mass Communications from Florida International University and an MSc in International Relations from the Institute of International Relations, UWI. Nirad is trying to be a good husband and father to his three children and is hoping to leave the world a little better than he found it.
Patricia Mohammed
Patricia Mohammed is a scholar, writer and filmmaker. She is Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies and Campus Coordinator/Chair, School for Graduate Studies and Research at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, a post she has held variously since 2007. She has headed the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at St Augustine for various periods and from 1994-2002 was appointed as first head of the Mona Unit, Centre for Gender and Development Studies, UWI. For the Fall semester 2007 she was Visiting Professor at State University of New York at Albany and has had visiting fellowships at University of Warwick and Queen’s University, Belfast. She was a recipient of the Vice-Chancellor’s regional award for Excellence in Research at The UWI in 2015.
Rawle Gibbons
Born in Belmont, Trinidad and Tobago, Rawle Gibbons is a playwright, director and educator. He has taught at the School of Drama, Jamaica, with Mr. Dennis Scott and at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, as the founding coordinator of the Centre for Creative and Festival Arts. His directing/devising credits include CLR James’s The Black Jacobins (1976), Temple in the Sea (1995), Shango, Tales of the Orisha (1996), Derek Walcott’s Drums and Colours (1998) and Nation Dance – the Pilgrimage (2012). He has published two volumes of his plays: A Calypso Trilogy (1999), Love Trilogy (2012). In 2014, Rawle Gibbons founded Caribbean Yard Campus, a network for the development of indigenous Caribbean education. He currently leads this project.
Raymond Antrobus
Raymond Antrobus was born in London to an English mother and Jamaican father. He is the author of Shapes & Disfigurements (Burning Eye, 2012) To Sweeten Bitter (Out-Spoken Press, 2017), The Perseverance (Penned In The Margins / Tin House, 2018) and All The Names Given (Picador / Tin House, 2021). In 2019 he became the first ever poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre.
Raymond also writes for young readers. His debut children’s picture book Can Bears Ski? is illustrated by Polly Dunbar and is published in the UK by Walker Books (2021) and in the US/Canada by Candle Wick Press (2020). It was selected as a Ezra Jack Keats honouree winner in 2021. In 2022 it was selected for a Read For Empathy (primary) Collection Award.
Richard Charan
Richard Charan has had a 25-year career in journalism and is employed as the multimedia editor with Caribbean Communications Network, the parent company of the Express and TV6. Charan’s writing has earned him multiple awards, including the MATT/RBTT media award for excellence in journalism, and then a PAHO award for feature/investigative writing. Last year, Charan won several CBU media awards for news and investigative writing. He is also the author of The Histtory Project, a long-running series in the Express newspaper. He has since collaborated with Ian Randle Publishers Limited out of Jamaica to publish the book titled The Village of One. Charan is also co-authoring a biography on one of Trinidad’s famed artists, and is also working on two non-fiction novels.
Rita Pemberton
Rita Pemberton is a former senior lecturer, Head of the Department of History and Deputy Dean, Student Affairs in the Faculty of Humanities and Education at The University of the West Indies, St Augustine Campus.
Ronald Cummings
Ronald Cummings is Professor of Caribbean Literature and Black Diaspora Studies at McMaster University, Canada. He has co-edited significant volumes including The Routledge Handbook of Caribbean Studies (with Pat Noxolo and Kevon Rhiney), The Fire That Time: Transnational Black Radicalism and The Sir George Williams University Occupation ( with Nalini Mohabir) and Caribbean Literature in Transition 1970-2020 (with Alison Donnell). He is also the editor of Make The World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen. Ronald is a senior editor at the Journal of West Indian literature (JWIL) and an editor of Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.
Ryan Bachoo
Ryan Bachoo has been a multimedia journalist for the past 15 years, covering numerous topics including news and current affairs, politics, sport, and climate change. As a presenter, he has also hosted several programmes, including anchoring the primetime news and the morning show. In 2023, he copped the Caribbean Broadcasting Union’s Best Caribbean Documentary Award for his production of Concordat. He has also been Editor of the Year for the last two years at Guardian Media where he works. In 2025, he published his debut novel, An Unending Search. The novel reflects Bachoo’s deep appreciation for West Indian literature and his commitment to preserving Caribbean storytelling traditions. His aim is to re-energise West Indian storytelling and inspire the young generation to not only read but write Caribbean literature.
Scarlet Ibis James
Scarlet Ibis James is an award-winning author from Trinidad and Tobago whose fiction explores family inheritance, cultural memory, and the complicated ways love endures across generations. Now based between the Caribbean and New York City, she writes stories that move between islands and cities, examining how truth, history, and personal choices shape the lives we build. Her work has received international recognition, including the Independent Author Network Book Award, the NYC Big Book Award, and the Literary Titan Gold Book Award. Through intimate, character-driven storytelling, James invites readers to confront difficult truths while imagining the possibility of healing.
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”, from her debut collection, won a Small Axe Literary Competition Prize for Poetry, and was on audiovisual display at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas. Find her work online at www.novelniche.net, shivaneeramlochan.com, @novelniche
Tafar Chia Lewis
Tafar Chia Lewis is an actress, playwright, and director, and currently the Artistic Director and Founder of Teatro Journee, a cultural performance and education company of emerging Caribbean artists creating immersive, socially engaged work with youth and communities. She holds an MFA from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, with a body of work spanning Trinidad and Tobago and internationally, including Nepal, India, Norway, and Scotland. Her practice is contemporary and anti-colonial, drawing on movement and testimony to centre marginalised voices. She is currently a part time lecturer at The University of the West Indies.
Tanya Batson-Savage
Tanya Batson-Savage is a writer, filmmaker, publisher, and creative consultant. She is publisher and editor in chief of the award-winning independent publishing house Blue Banyan Books (and its imprint Blouse & Skirt Books) and co-founder of Have a Bawl Productions. A Fellow of the Calabash International Literary Festival and Cropper Residential writing workshops, she earned JAFTA/Porter Screenwriting and Rotterdam Producer Lab Fellowships. She has produced two short films – Agwe and A Shade of Indigo. Her non-fiction has been widely anthologized and she’s authored the critically acclaimed play Woman Tongue and two works for children: Pumpkin Belly and Other Stories and My Name is Mary.
Tanya Batson-Savage
Tanya Batson-Savage is a writer, filmmaker, publisher and creative consultant, with a love of mangoes. She is currently publisher and editor in chief of and the online magazine Susumba and its literary offshoot Susumba’s Book Bag as well as the award-winning independent publishing house, Blue Banyan Books – the fastest growing tradebook publisher in the English-speaking Caribbean. Tanya has written for the page, stage, screen and radio (and one day she will write a story about a mango). Her love of stories grew while she was seated at her grandmother’s feet, where she developed a passion for folktales that shines through in her first collection of stories of children Pumpkin Belly and Other Stories (Blue Banyan Books/ Blue Moon Publishing). Her play Woman Tongue received 8 Actor Boy Award Nominations (2016) and her short film script ‘Endeavour’ earned the award for Best Script in the Kingston Anime Festival (2013).
Tessa McWatt
Tessa McWatt’s most recent book is The Snag: A Mother, a Forest, and Wild Grief, winner of the 2026 OCM Bocas Prize for Nonfiction. Her seven novels include her latest, The Snow Line, shortlisted for the 2022 Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize. Her non-fiction work includes Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada, co-edited with Dionne Brand and Rabindranath Maharaj, and Shame On Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging, winner of the 2020 OCM Bocas Prize for Nonfiction. It was also shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Prize 2020 and received a 2018 Eccles British Library Award. Tessa, born in Guyana, is also a librettist and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.
Tracy Assing
Tracy Assing is a writer, editor and filmmaker. Her 2010 film The Amerindians explored Assing’s own identity, the indigenous history of the islands and the political structure of the Santa Rosa Carib Community (now the First People’s Community).
Vindhar Suraj
Vindhar Suraj loves to write. As a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago, he draws heavily on his island/Caribbean life for inspiration. His interest is in representing the Caribbean experience by drawing on techniques of magical realism to create familiar yet unique perspectives. Fantasy and magic are part of his world. He is working on his first novel, which incorporates local folklore into a local setting.