Poet wins top OCM Bocas prize

The winner of the 2020 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature is Trinidadian-born, British Virgin Islands-resident Richard Georges.

His poetry collection Epiphaneia presents readers with the aftermath of catastrophic Hurricane Irma, which devastated the islands in 2017.

In a media release, the Bocas Literary Festival said the book is the third book of poetry to win the most prestigious international annual award for Caribbean writing since it was established ten years ago.

The prize comes with a US$10,000 award and will be presented to the winner during the Bocas Literary Festival, which has been rescheduled to September 18-20 because of the covid19 pandemic.

Chief judge and renowned TT writer Earl Lovelace made the announcement online via the Bocas Lit Fest Facebook page in a virtual presentation on May 2.

The other two judges were Prof Emerita Bridget Brereton, writer and academician Barbara Lalla, and literary scholar Laurence Breiner.

The judges chose the book from a shortlist of the three books previously selected as category winners. These were Everything Inside, a collection of short fiction by the celebrated Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat, the best book of fiction by a Caribbean writer in 2020, and the winner of the non-fiction category is Shame on Me – An Anatomy of Race and Belonging, by Guyana-born, Canada-bred, UK-based Tessa McWatt. Danticat and McWatt will receive US$3,000 each.

Lovelace said in his judge’s remarks “Responses to catastrophe frequently take in evasion or cynicism: despair or glib resolution. Often they confine themselves in the familiar shapes of narrative, lamentation, or outrage. These poems take no such predictable shapes. It is as if each verse-form were a different lens for viewing the storm and the life in its aftermath. What makes these offerings so poignant is that many of them are lit with the brilliant life of the day-after. That epiphanic light of discovery is Richard Georges’ gift to us. We are delighted to acknowledge this accomplishment by one of the region's phenomenal generation of younger poets.”

Previously longlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize, Georges is the author of the poetry collections Make Us All Islands (Shearsman Books) and GIANT (Platypus Press). He has been awarded the 2016 Marvin E Williams Literary Prize by The Caribbean Writer, and has been longlisted for several other literary prizes. His third collection of poems, Epiphaneia, is published by Out-spoken Press.

In 2019, the prize was won by Trinidadian writer Kevin Adonis Browne for his non-fiction book High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture.

Other past winners are Jennfier Rahim for her short story collection Curfew Chronicles (2018); Kei Miller for the novel Augustown (2017); Olive Senior for the short fiction collection The Pain Tree (2016); Vladimir Lucien for the debut poetry collection Sounding Ground (2015); Robert Antoni for the novel As Flies to Whatless Boys (2014); Monique Roffey for the novel Archipelago (2013); and Earl Lovelace for the novel Is Just a Movie (2012). The late Nobel laureate Derek Walcott was winner of the inaugural prize in 2011, for the poetry collection White Egrets.