Nine authors vie for Bocas prize

Books by nine authors, writing across a diverse range of subjects, styles, and approaches, have been longlisted for the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

Now in its 14th consecutive year, the OCM Bocas Prize annually recognises books in three genre categories – poetry, fiction, and literary non-fiction – published by authors of Caribbean birth or citizenship in the preceding year. It is sponsored by One Caribbean Media and will be held from April 25-28.

Five different countries and territories are represented among the authors of the nine books longlisted for the 2024 Prize.

In the poetry category, the three books longlisted are by younger writers.

In Self-Portrait as Othello, UK-based Jamaican Jason Allen-Paisant "answers Shakespeare’s gamble with an Othello as sure as he is pitched to the contours of a 21st-century vulnerability,” the judges said.

Fellow Jamaican Ishion Hutchinson’s School of Instructions “attempts, in a language attentive to the limits of speech, the slippage of word into sound, to shake up our sense of the historic record.” The book explores the experience of West Indian volunteer soldiers in British regiments during the first World War.

The third book is The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, by US Virgin Islands-born Nicole Sealey. It reworks the official report of the US government’s investigation into racist police and court procedures in Ferguson, Missouri, in the aftermath of the 2014 killing of Michael Brown.

The writers of the three books longlisted in the fiction category range from an acclaimed veteran to a debut author.

Ocean Stirrings: A Work of Fiction in Tribute to Louise Langdon Norton Little, Working Mother and Activist, Mother of Malcolm X and Seven Siblings by US-based Grenadian Merle Collins “richly imagines the mother of Malcolm X as a person in her own right and highlights the intricate networks of personal and political alliances of the era,” the judges said.

The judges call Hungry Ghosts by Trinidadian Kevin Jared Hosein “A work of historical fiction which resonates today in its exploration of the personal and the political. Themes of grief, loss, power and desire, in all their manifestations, are acutely observed and handled with a deft touch.”

They describe You Were Watching from the Sand, the debut short story collection by Haitian-American Juliana Lamy as “whimsical and playful on the surface," but broaches themes "as wide and varied as the amorphousness of the spirit and the inherent ambiguities housed within splintered lives."

The non-fiction category features another US-based, Haiti-born writer, alongside authors of accomplished biographical works.

Harvesting Haiti: Reflections on Unnatural Disasters is a collection of essays, talks, and other texts by Myriam J A Chancy, all written in the aftermath of the devastating January 2010 earthquake.

Equal to Mystery: In Search of Harold Sonny Ladoo, the debut book by Trinidadian Christopher Laird, is a “groundbreaking investigation of one of the Caribbean’s most influential yet mysterious literary figures,” said the judges.

How to Say Babylon: A Memoir by US-based Jamaican Safiya Sinclair, “Reminds us of the expansive possibilities of creative non-fiction, bringing to the fore with unforgettable poetic verve a voice that is fierce, courageous, deeply intelligent and empathetic, its nerve endings vibrating out from a specific experience of Rastafarianism into the currents of the wider world,” the judges said.

The winners in the three genre categories will be announced on April 7, and will compete for the overall prize of US$10,000, to be announced on April 27.