Author Kevin Jared Hosein talks Caribbean literature in Europe

AUTHOR Kevin Jared Hosein, writer of the award-winning novel Hungry Ghosts, said he is excited to be visiting Belfast, Ireland as part of the Bocas Lit Festival’s European literary tour beginning on October 11. He said he considers Ireland the centre of the literary world.

The tour will go to London, Madrid and Belfast, with different types of events in each city.

“In terms of prestige, it’s kind of the literary capital of the world. Ireland has a couple million people, it has a long history, and the ratio of writers and readers is very high in that population. A lot of people does think you need to live in a huge country for you to flourish in writing, but Ireland is not really big, yet they have this entire culture.

“I remember asking an Irish writer last year how come that was, and she said the simplest answer was that writing was the only thing they really knew how to do. They didn’t really excel at sports, but they knew how to write.”

While in Ireland, Hosein, Safiya Sinclair (How to Say Babylon) and Monique Roffey (The Mermaid of Black Conch) will read from and discuss their recent books of fiction and memoir, exploring how the most intimate relations of family and friendship are shaped by the stresses and conflicts of societies under pressure.

Hosein said while he wouldn’t be in Ireland for very long, he was also looking forward to attending events at the Belfast International Arts Festival to get an first-person view of it.

He compared the Irish literary scene to that of Trinidad and Tobago, as the country also has a small population.

“We have, in a good way, a disproportionate (number) of creatives here in all areas, but let me stick to writers, where there are probably more, or it’s close, writers than readers. You don’t have many readers here, some, but unfortunately you have to depend on a foreign audience for sales. But the (number) of writers we have that have broken through or are breaking through is very high.

“It’s kind of like a minor miracle I find. You would think we would have all the encouragement in the world, but you don’t really have it. You does kind of have to find it within a network, or find it within yourself to do this thing.”

Speaking to Newsday during an interview at Noir Coffee Lab, Austin Street, St Augustine on October 3, Hosein said this was his first major trip since he went to Edinburgh, Scotland, when he was shortlisted for and eventually awarded the Sir Walter Scott Prize in June 2024. The book also won the 2024 OCM Bocas Lit Prize for Fiction.

“We got to go to Abbotsford, where he used to live, the writers got a tour of the grounds of the house, we got to see where he used to write. We learned about his routine, saw the books he collected and preserved over the years. We got to go to the Borders Book Festival, which is when the prize was awarded.”

He said since then, he has turned down invitations as he found constant travelling made it difficult to write, and he is working on another book, which will be his fifth.

“In addition to this trip, I’ll be going to the BVI Literary Arts Festival (BVI Lit Fest) in November, which was co-founded by author Richard Georges. That’s probably the only other thing I’ll be doing this year.”

“Writing, for me, is solitary. The stressful part for me is going out to market the book, which has to be done, and doing panels.”

Hosein said he invests what spare time he has in education, as he was a science teacher for 12 years, since he was 23. He said he had to give up teaching full-time once Hungry Ghosts was published, but misses it for various reasons.

“I still tutor people one-on-one. I have a YouTube channel called KJH where I upload educational videos on biology, physics, do past papers, things like that. It has like half a million views on it, but I don’t know if anyone knows it’s me.

“Especially around CXC, I go onto a platform called the Student Hub, founded by online educator Kerwin Springer, where children go to get past papers to help each other, and if anyone has questions, I would see them and answer.”

Hosein said being around young people helped with the inspiration for his novels.

“When I was writing and teaching at the same time, you still had the social aspect. I does write a lot about young people and I would pick up cues from being around so much of youth all the time. So when I was writing Beasts of Kukuyo (his third book), some of the characters' personalities were drawn from there.

“I miss it, because now I’m one step removed from that, and I try not to get myself in a bubble with just literary folk. So I have tried to get out there for more than interviews and getting information. For Hungry Ghosts, I had to do a lot of interviews to get information, but I try to make the process as informal as possible so people don’t feel too edgy.”

Hosein said he wants to finish the draft of his new book, The Pariah, by the end of the year, at the urging of his agent.

“They don’t want a year to pass since I won the prize, because when someone else wins the prize, saying I’m a past winner isn’t as enticing when they try to sell the book.

“The Pariah is about a poet who lost her family and is rediscovering herself in a virtual world. It’s very different from what I’ve written before. Sometimes I set up challenges for myself where I want to write something in the present this time. You don’t want to typecast yourself, because when you write a lot about a certain thing, that’s what people will come to expect.”

He said he was also looking forward to meeting up with Sinclair as well as author of The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh Ingrid Persaud, who he would have met at Jamaica’s Calabash Literary Festival in 2023.

Hosein said he was excited about networking and connecting with Spanish publishers and translators in Madrid. He said while Hungry Ghosts has been translated into eight languages so far, none of them was Spanish. He said while his publisher would have contacted their usual publishers, it was possible he could meet someone in Spain he could connect them with.

“It would be nice to get into the Spanish markets as well, including Latin America.”

Hosein said it was important to take TT and Caribbean literature beyond the Caribbean, which the Bocas Lit Fest has been doing through various initiatives.

“It’s good to connect the diaspora, to connect with audiences that might be unfamiliar with Caribbean stories. Sometimes it only takes that one story that opens the gate. Hopefully someone who never really engaged with Caribbean literature before will come to one of the panels and say, 'That’s something I might be interested in,' and they read that book and say, 'Maybe I should read a few more.' That’s how it is with anything.”

Hosein said he was glad Trinidadian and Caribbean authors were writing in genres that were not literary.

“I find a lot of Caribbean books really challenge the reader, they’re not usually easy in terms of content, or even if they were to write in the Creole. It might be a little steep to start, but once you start going, you would fall into the rhythm. That’s true in almost every region, but I think our writing has a little less pulp in it, and maybe we need a little more pulp in it. A lot of it is literary.

“Things like romance are new on the shelves, even though people have always been writing it. To see it propped up on the shelves is new and I enjoy that. I always push for diversity of genre, like if you want to write science fiction or fantasy or books for young people.

“We don’t have enough detective and procedural-type fiction out there. We’re not removed from crime, we’re removed from the process of detecting it and solving it. I’ve tried to ask about the process, but people are a little vague about it. We do have violence in our books, but not solving the violence.”

Hosein said there was a greater push for diversity when the CODE Burt Award for Caribbean Young Adult Literature was being offered from 2013-2019.

“Those books tended to lean more toward magical realism and fun genres, you wouldn’t write this big literary thing for a teen. It would be fun to open up more opportunities, especially for that. That has its problems too, though, with what topics schools are willing to accept.”

Hosein said he realised people had misconceptions about publishing.

“It’s a little duller than what you think. In some areas, it can be different than what you think, in good ways. When you actually get there, it does be exciting, but you kinda take it for granted when you get there.

“I try not to do that, because when I talk to writers who are now trying to get through, I realise I really went through some things to reach here, went through all kinds of hoops. Trying to get an agent is like pulling teeth, it does be real hard, and I was really lucky to get through with it.”