Gordon Rohlehr, Seepersad Naipaul books to debut at Bocas Lit Fest

Two of Trinidad and Tobago’s literary icons will star at the 2024 NGC Bocas Lit Fest – but posthumously, with the launch of much-anticipated new books.

On April 28, the programme for the Anglophone Caribbean’s biggest literary festival will include special launch events for a new memoir by the late Prof Gordon Rohlehr, who died in 2023, and a long-awaited collection of journalism by Seepersad Naipaul (1906–1953), father of Nobel laureate VS Naipaul. Both books are published by UK-based Peepal Tree Press.

Rohlehr’s book A Literary Friendship, completed a few months before his death last year, is subtitled Selected Notes on the Kamau Brathwaite-Gordon Rohlehr Correspondence. It draws on decades of letters between the Guyana-born scholar and UWI academic and the Barbadian poet, as well as Rohlehr’s previously unpublished notebooks, to give readers a double portrait of two of the Caribbean’s most important intellectual figures, a media release said.

A Literary Friendship, writes the publisher, “documents, invaluably, the movements in Caribbean thought, literary culture and collective activity over those years; it focuses on the human relationship and sometimes disagreements between two of the region’s most important articulators of the difficult struggle to decolonise its arts and culture; it offers an honest and perceptive account of the nature of friendship and its, perhaps, inevitable inequalities; and it reflects movingly on the personal costs of confronting a world that seems bent on forgetting.”

At the launch at 11 am on April 28, Peepal Tree publisher Jeremy Poynting will introduce the book, followed by a conversation chaired by UWI professor emerita and fiction writer Barbara Lalla, also including UWI scholar Prof Paula Morgan, TT writer Anu Lakhan, and Barbadian scholar Aaron Kamugisha.

Later that day, from 4 pm, the Lit Fest will also host the launch of Amazing Scenes: Selected Journalism 1928-1953 by Seepersad Naipaul, which collects 25 years’ worth of writing originally published in the Trinidad Guardian and inaccessible to readers for over 70 years, the release said.

The book “makes the case that the very best journalism has every right to be considered as seriously as literary fiction,” writes the publisher. “In a country which has prized the newspaper columnist who combines insight with high style, Seepersad Naipaul claims the status of a pioneer.”

The session will include readings from the pieces collected in the book as well as a wide-ranging conversation between co-editors Prof Kenneth Ramchand, Aaron Eastley, and Nivedita Misra. The fourth co-editor was Prof Brinsley Samaroo, who died in 2023.

The NGC Bocas Lit Fest from April 25-28, also includes a packed lineup of readings, performances, workshops, and events for children and teens, with headline writers including Edwidge Danticat, Dionne Brand, Rabindranath Maharaj, Ingrid Persaud and Canisia Lubrin.

The full programme is online at www.bocaslitfest.com.