4 Trinidadians shortlisted for Bocas Literature prize

Four Trinidadians are among 15 authors who have been shortlisted for the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

They have been selected across the three categories for poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Mervyn Taylor's book Getting Through: New and Selected Poems and Anthony Vahni Capildeo's Polkadot Wounds are among the five poetry finalists. A K Herman's The Believers is among the fiction finalists, while the nonfiction contender is Salvage: Readings from the Wreck by Dionne Brand.

The OCM Bocas Prize is the most-coveted award for Caribbean authors. It recognises books in three genre categories – poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction – published by authors of Caribbean birth or citizenship in the preceding year, a media release said.

The event is sponsored by One Caribbean Media, owner of the Trinidad and Tobago Express newspaper, TV6 and the OCM radio network.

The prize has been presented annually since 2011 and in commemoration of the 15th year of the prize, the shortlists for the three genre categories have each been increased to five books, resulting in 15 books for the overall award.

Debut books make up a strong proportion of the shortlists, with six first-time authors selected by the judges, the release said.

The genre winners will be announced on April 6 and overall winner will be announced on May 3 during the Bocas Lit Fest which takes place from May 1-4 at various venues in TT.

Poetry

The authors of the five books shortlisted for the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry include two veterans alongside three debut poets.

Polkadot Wounds by Trinidadian-Scottish Anthony Vahni Capildeo “transforms form,” say the judges. “These poems make it seem like an easy feat to hold millennia in one image and then another, moving inside of time with grace … It is in fact a miracle only made possible by bringing a depth of precision and an openness of sound together again and again.”

West of West Indian by Linzey Corridon, born in St Vincent and the Grenadines, based in Canada – “reclaims deadly and derogatory stereotypes to create a counter archive of Caribbean LGBTQ healing,” the judges remark. “With reclamatory portraits and transformative questions, Corridon works a spell and opens a way. This collection of poems will be a life-saving and life-giving text for years to come.”

Some of Us Can Go Back Home – Jamaican Yashika Graham – “is a stunning debut where the vital energy of the poetic work meets the craft of an insightful and brave voice. In Graham, we have a worthy steward of the lineage of Lorna Goodison, Olive Senior, Edward Baugh, and generations of poets who offer a loving claim and a transformational call through their precise and attentive poetic ceremonies.”

Getting Through: New and Selected Poems – US-based Trinidadian Mervyn Taylor – “is a record of a lifetime of deep listening and intense observation. This collection, which gathers many years of Taylor’s impactful poems while also offering astute new poems relevant to this very moment, is a study in the practice of poetry as relation. This collection reminds us why Taylor is a poet who has already opened doors for generations.”

Coco Island, by UK-based Jamaican poet Christine Roseeta Walker – “reclaims Negril, not as a tourist fantasy, but as a zone of haunting magic and coming of age,” say the judges. “The characters Walker develops are real enough to walk off the page, and yet the magic of their realism means they live instead in the hearts, minds, and dreams of the reader. This book of poems creates and populates a world so fully that it almost becomes a novel in verse.”

Fiction

The five books shortlisted for the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Fiction similarly bring together three first-time authors with two already celebrated multi-genre writers.

Village Weavers – Haiti-born Myriam J A Chancy — “a compellingly ambitious and beautifully executed narrative,” say the judges — ranges over six decades as it explores the relationship between two women who grew up together in 1940s Port-au-Prince.

“Chancy conjures the complex, enduring intensity of this friendship beautifully, confirming its importance at the very heart of the two women’s lives … Her narrative voice is quietly poetic throughout, punctuated by intensely lyrical descriptions and arresting metaphors.”

Sweet Li Jie – veteran UK-based Guyanese writer David Dabydeen is a historical novel told through a series of letters written by a late, 19th-century Chinese migrant in British Guiana, addressed to his sweetheart in Wuhan Province.

“Dabydeen uses the epistolary device to great effect, to allow fascinating angles on how Guiana and its inhabitants might have appeared to a relatively well-off Chinese arrivant, bringing with him a different range of prejudices to the more familiar European ones … The writing is both poised and playful.”

The Pages of the Sea, the debut novel by Grenada-born Anne Hawk, “brings new energy and form to a familiar narrative of Caribbean childhood, that of the pain and desolation of the child left behind when a parent migrates.”

Set in an unnamed island in the 1960s, it tells the story of a young girl whose mother has left for Britain in search of work. “The prose has an immediacy that matches the girl’s intensity, as well as her confusion about what secrets the adults around her appear to be hiding.”

The Believers, a collection of sometimes-linked short stories by TT-born A K Herman, is another debut work. “Settings range from Scarborough in Tobago to the Bronx in New York, and are described in quick, deft strokes … Herman conjures characters with equal dexterity,” say the judges.

“Each story swiftly establishes its narrative arc and delivers with integrity and verve, setting the context and parameters for interpretation confidently and persuasively.”

Sweetness in the Skin, the debut novel by Jamaica-born Ishi Robinson. “The novel charts the slow, patient journey of its teenage protagonist and narrator Pumkin to make a life for herself despite her mother’s persistent neglect and simmering resentment … Mother, aunt, and grandmother are all compellingly brought to life in Pumkin’s telling, through vivid dialogue and a series of dramatic emotional scenes.”

Nonfiction

The books shortlisted for the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Nonfiction are highly diverse in topic and approach, tackling autobiography, family memoir, history, and cultural analysis.

Salvage: Readings from the Wreck by Trinidadian-Canadian Dionne Brand, “profoundly, beautifully, and deftly changes how we read and see,” say the judges. “The many levels of writing in Salvage work to rethink the novel not just as content and representation, but as the specific engine of a certain kind of worldly knowing … Much like Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, Salvage will change forever how we read the novel and the work the novel does in the world.

We’re Alone – Haitian-American Edwidge Danticat – “Against a backdrop of social, political, ecological, and other upheavals,” the essay collection “smoothly crafts a narrative that refuses to rest in victimhood … Loss is at the heart of this book, but loss does not immobilise, rather it is the impulse for Danticat to roam from the United States to Haiti, plotting for readers the limits of our present organisation of life.”

Resistance Refuge Revival: The Indigenous Kalinagos of Dominica, by Dominican anthropologist and archaeologist Lennox Honychurch – is an “epic account,” say the judges, “that restores to the Caribbean a story that should be our
lingua franca. This elegant and accessible story is a gift to the region, its artists, its students, its Kalinago population, and Indigenous activists throughout the Americas … We are left with the ethical imperative of centring this encounter as we go forward into the future.”

Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond – by Guyanese-American Oneka LaBennett – “is a groundbreaking genre-fluid work … This major contribution to Afro-Asian dialogue in the Caribbean takes seriously the specificity of Guyana, the archive, the personal, and the diasporic. It also crafts a trajectory that reminds us why the Caribbean is itself a global formation.”

Mother Archive: A Dominican Family Memoir, by Erika Morillo, born in the Dominican Republic and based in the US. “Morillo’s memoir of trauma, violence, and motherhood maps her life across the Americas against a backdrop of state violence, disappearance, and the intimacy and disappointment of family. This episodic memoir tells the difficult story of mother-daughter relations against and alongside the difficult politics of representation and loss.”