Celebrating Trinidad's Bocas Lit Fest at Ten

In partnership with the NGC Bocas Lit Fest

Olive Senior is the prizewinning author of 18 books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and children’s literature. Her work is taught internationally and has been widely translated. She is a winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature among others, and has been shortlisted for Canada’s Governor-General’s award for poetry. A Jamaican by birth, she now lives in Toronto but returns frequently to the Caribbean, which remains central to her work. A book of her Pandemic Poems which she has been sharing on social media will be published soon. See www.olivesenior.com/

Olive was interviewed for Your Local Arena’s Caribbean Journey.

Bocas at Ten – Featured Authors in Your Local Arena

Jacqueline Bishop

Jacqueline Bishop is an award-winning writer and visual artist born and raised in Jamaica, who now lives between London and New York City. She has twice been awarded Fulbright Fellowships, including a year-long grant to Morocco; her work exhibits widely in North America, Europe and North Africa. Bishop's books include a novel, The River’s Song (2007), two collections of poems, Fauna (2006) and Snapshots from Istanbul (2009), a 2007 art book entitled Writers Who Paint, Painters Who Write: 3 Three Jamaican Artists, and The Gymnast and Other Positions (2015), a collection of short stories, essays and interviews. The Gymnast and Other Positions won the non-fiction category of the 2016 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. The Gift of Music and Song: Interviews with Jamaican Women Writers is forthcoming. See: www.peepaltreepress.com/books/gift-music-and-song-interviews-jamaican-women-writers

Jacqueline featured on film in Caribbean Nights: Poetry.

Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné

Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné is a poet and visual artist from Trinidad and Tobago. Her poetry has been featured in publications such as Poetry London, The Rialto, Prairie Schooner, POETRY, Small Axe, Bim: Arts for the 21st Century and The Asian American Literary Review, as well as in anthologies such as Coming Up Hot: Eight Poets from the Caribbean and Thicker than Water, both published by Peekash Press. Danielle was named winner of the 2013 Small Axe Literary Competition, the 2015 Hollick-Arvon Caribbean Writers’ Prize and the 2016 Wasafiri New Writing Prize. Her first collection of poems, Doe Songs (Peepal Tree Press, 2018) was awarded the 2019 Bocas OCM Prize in Poetry. See www.peepaltreepress.com/books/doe-songs

Danielle’s poem featured in Caribbean Journey.

Bernardine Evaristo

Bernardine Evaristo won the Booker Prize 2019 with her eighth book, Girl, Woman, Other, the first black woman and Black British person to do so. In 2020 she was also the first woman of colour to top the UK paperback fiction chart, holding the top spot for five weeks. Her writing spans poetry, verse fiction, essays and literary criticism. She has won many awards and honours including an MBE in 2009. A longstanding arts’ activist, she co-founded Britain’s first black women’s theatre company, Theatre of Black Women, in 1982, and many other inclusion projects since, including Spread the Word, The Complete Works and the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and Vice Chair of the Royal Society of Literature. See www.bevaristo.com

Bernardine featured on film in Who is Poly Styrene?

Colin Grant

Colin Grant is an author, historian and Associate Fellow at the Centre for Caribbean Studies. His books include: Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey and a group biography of the Wailers, I&I, The Natural Mystics. His memoir of growing up in a Caribbean family in 1970s Luton, Bageye at the Wheel, was shortlisted for the 2013 Pen/Ackerly Prize. Grant’s history of epilepsy, A Smell of Burning, was a Sunday Times Book of the Year in 2016. As a producer for the BBC, Grant wrote and directed several radio drama documentaries including African Man of Letters: The Life of Ignatius Sancho and A Fountain of Tears: The Murder of Federico Garcia Lorca. Grant also writes for a number of newspapers and journals including the Guardian, TLS and New York Review of Books. Grant’s latest book is Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation. See www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1116148/homecoming/9781784709136.html

Colin ran masterclasses for Caribbean Nights: Poetry; TS Eliot; Caribbean Nights: Calypso, Carnival and Steel Pan and Three Kings of Calypso; and Them and Uz: Tony Harrison - and gave a reading for Caribbean Journey.

Anthony Joseph

Anthony Joseph is a Trinidad-born poet, novelist, academic and musician who has been referred to as ‘the leader of the black avant garde in Britain’. As a musician and spoken word artist he has released seven critically acclaimed albums which blend Afro-Caribbean music, free jazz and funk. The most recent, People of the Sun (Heavenly Sweetness) was recorded in Trinidad and released in 2018. In the same year he curated ‘Windrush: A Celebration’, a series of five events which celebrated the literary and musical legacies of the Windrush generation, culminating in a gala concert at the Barbican as part of the London Jazz Festival. Joseph’s novel, Kitch, a biography of calypso icon Lord Kitchener, was shortlisted for the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize, the OCM Bocas Fiction Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award. In 2019 he was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. His latest novel, The Frequency of Magic, is just out. See www.peepaltreepress.com/books/frequency-magic

Anthony’s poem featured in Caribbean Nights: Poetry and he featured on film in Caribbean Nights: Calypso, Carnival and Steel Pan and Three Kings of Calypso.

Hannah Lowe

Hannah Lowe is a writer and academic in London, UK. Her first poetry collection Chick (Bloodaxe, 2013) won the Michael Murphy Memorial Award for Best First Collection and was shortlisted for the Forward, Aldeburgh and Seamus Heaney Best First Collection Prizes. Her second collection is Chan (Bloodaxe, 2016). In 2014, she was named as one of 20 Next Generation British poets, an accolade awarded once a decade. She has also published four chapbooks: The Hitcher (Rialto 2012); R x (sine wave peak, 2013); Ormonde (Hercules Editions 2014). (2016) and most recently, The Neighbourhood (Outspoken Press, 2019). She has been Writer in Residence at Keats House and currently lectures in Creative Writing at Brunel University. See hannahlowe.me/

Hannah featured on film in Caribbean Nights: Poetry.

Vladimir Lucien

Vladimir Lucien is a writer, actor and critic from St. Lucia. His debut collection of poetry, Sounding Ground (Peepal Tree Press, 2014), won the 2015 Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and was hailed by poet Kamau Brathwaite as ‘a sign of the start of a new tradition in the anglophone Caribbean’. Lucien is also co-editor of Sent Lisi: Poems and Art of St. Lucia and the screenwriter of the 2012 documentary, The Merikins. Several of Lucien’s poems have been translated into other languages including Dutch, Mandarin, Italian and French. His criticism and essays have also been published widely in journals such as the PN Review, Asymptote and Poetry International. Hailed by CBC books in 2017 as a ‘young black writer to watch’, Lucien’s is an important voice in his generation of writers. See www.peepaltreepress.com/books/sounding-ground

Vladimir’s poem featured in Caribbean Journey.

Roger Robinson

Roger Robinson is a writer who has performed worldwide. He is the winner of the 2019 T S Eliot Prize and the 2020 RSL Ondaatje Prize. His latest collection, A Portable Paradise, was a New Statesman Book of the Year. He is an alumnus of The Complete Works and was shortlisted for The OCM Bocas Poetry Prize and the Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize, has been commended by the Forward Poetry Prize and is currently shortlisted for the 2020 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. Roger has received commissions from The National Trust, the BBC, The National Portrait Gallery, the V&A Museum and Theatre Royal Stratford East among others. His workshops have been shortlisted for the Gulbenkian Prize for Museums and Galleries and were also a part of the Webby Award-winning Barbican’s Can I Have A Word. He is co-founder of Spoke Lab and the international writing collective Malika’s Kitchen. He is the lead vocalist and lyricist for King Midas Sound and has recorded solo albums with Jahtari Records. See rogerrobinsononline.com/

Roger featured on film in T S Eliot.

Monique Roffey

Monique Roffey is an award-winning Trinidadian-born British writer of novels, essays, a memoir and literary journalism. Her novels have been translated into five languages and shortlisted for several major awards, (the Orange, Encore, Orion and Costa Fiction Award) and, in 2013, Archipelago won the OCM Bocas Award for Caribbean Literature. With the Kisses of His Mouth and The Tryst are works which examine female sexuality and desire. Her essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Boundless magazine, The Independent, Wasafiri and Caribbean Quarterly. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and was a founding member of WRITERS REBEL, an active writer-led working group within Extinction Rebellion. Her latest book is The Mermaid of Black Conch. See www.peepaltreepress.com/books/mermaid-black-conch

Monique ran masterclasses for Three Faces of Bradford; The Banana; and The Dreams of William Golding.