Trini authors vie for 2025 OCM Bocas Prize

TRINIDADIAN authors Anthony Vahni Capildeo and Dionne Brand have been named category winners in the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, alongside Haitian-Canadian-American novelist Myriam JA Chancy.

Capildeo and Brand secured the poetry and nonfiction categories, respectively, and all three authors will now compete for the overall prize, which will be announced at the Bocas Lit Fest in May.

The OCM Bocas Prize, sponsored by One Caribbean Media, recognises outstanding books by authors of Caribbean birth or citizenship, and is considered the region’s most distinguished literary award.

Capildeo, a Trinidadian-Scottish poet, won the poetry category for their ninth full-length book, Polkadot Wounds.

“Partly inspired by a residency in Cornwall, these poems wrestle equally with nature and landscape, concealed or forgotten histories, and tensions between community and ‘loss and longing,’” a release from Bocas Lit Fest noted.

The prize judges have praised Capildeo's ability to play with language, creating new spaces for the imagination and holding millennia in a single image.

Capildeo is a past winner of the Forward Prize for Poetry (2016) and was recently awarded a 2025 Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry.

The poetry panel was chaired by Anguillan-American author Alexis Pauline Gumbs, alongside Canadian-British poet Alycia Pirmohamed, and Venezuelan poet and translator Adalber Salas Hernández.

Brand, a Trinidadian-Canadian author and winner of the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize for Fiction, secured the nonfiction prize for Salvage: Readings from the Wreck.

Published by Knopf Canada/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Salvage is a series of essays described by the judges as “profoundly, beautifully, and deftly changes how we read and see … Brand’s beautifully crafted work, with its intelligent insights, precise re-readings and brilliant seeing gives readers another account of the experience of reading the shadows of the celebrated literary works she unpacks.”

Brand's other honours include a Windham-Campbell Prize, Canada’s Governor-General’s Award for Poetry and the Griffin Poetry Prize.

The nonfiction panel was chaired by Barbados-born scholar Rinaldo Walcott, Gabrielle Hosein, and Dominica-born writer, curator, and artist Catherine Lord.

Chancy, a Haitian-Canadian-American author, is the winner in the fiction category of the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize.

Her novel, Village Weavers, tells the story of a fractured friendship between two girls growing up in Haiti in the 1940s.

Despite their opposite class backgrounds, the girls are drawn to each other until a family secret ends their friendship.

“Chancy is a compelling storyteller, deftly keeping the focus on her key characters while also indicating the complex political contexts in which they live … All these factors make Village Weavers a compellingly ambitious and beautifully executed narrative.”

Chancy has won the Guyana Prize in Literature Caribbean Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

The fiction panel was chaired by Guyanese-British literary scholar Denise deCaires Narain, alongside TT writer Celeste Mohammed and Trinidadian-British Fleur Sinclair.

The three chairs of the genre panels now make up the final jury, joined by chief judge Erna Brodber.

The 2025 Bocas Lit Fest will run from May 1-4 in Port of Spain.