by Nicholas Laughlin on October 24, 2015
Barbara Jenkins. Photograph by Arnaldo James, courtesy Caribbean Beat Two days ago, the CRB published “Flood”, a new piece of fiction by Trinidadian writer Barbara Jenkins, excerpted from her novel-in-progress De Rightest Place. Jenkins, past winner of the Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize (among other awards), published her debut short story collection Sic Transit Wagon [...]
by Nicholas Laughlin on November 4, 2013
An interview with writer Andre Bagoo and graphic designer Kriston Chen about the collaborative Douen Islands project
by Nicholas Laughlin on March 3, 2011
Founded in 1997 in Jamaica, currently based in New York, Small Axe is one of the Caribbean’s leading intellectual journals, devoted to “fashioning a criticism that works through our intellectual tradition.” Or, as editor-in-chief David Scott put it in a November 2008 CRB interview: concerned with intervening in debates about the Caribbean in such a [...]
by Nicholas Laughlin on January 20, 2011
Cover of the first issue of ARC; image courtesy the publishers Creative work can’t thrive in isolation. Every artist, writer, musician, performer, or filmmaker needs contact with creative peers, a creative tradition, and an attentive audience, but also access to a critical space, a forum for sharing and discussing ideas. To put it more simply, [...]
by Nicholas Laughlin on October 24, 2010
V.S. Naipaul in his younger days NAIPAUL I’m unusual in that I have had a long career. Most people from limited backgrounds write one book. I’m a prose writer. A prose book contains many thousands of sentiments, observations, thoughts — it is a lot of work. The pattern for most people is to do a [...]
by Nicholas Laughlin on September 3, 2010
I’ve known Lisa Allen-Agostini since we were both undergraduates at UWI-St Augustine — long enough ago that I have to squint and do some mental math to work out the year. The very first time we met, she was introduced to me as a writer. At a stage when most of our peers were still [...]
by Nicholas Laughlin on August 31, 2010
Christian Campbell. Photograph by Sammy Rawal, courtesy Peepal Tree Press Today is Independence Day here in Trinidad and Tobago — parades, flags, fireworks — and today we also wrap up the current issue of the CRB with three last features. First, a portfolio of images from the painted wilde bussen — minibuses — of Paramaribo, [...]
by Nicholas Laughlin on August 16, 2010
V.S. Naipaul on BBC TV, 1994 “I’ve always been a writer. I’ve thought about it every day. There’s not been a day or part of a day when I’ve not thought about it . . . It has enabled me to be a free man . . . I’ve not written anything that I didn’t [...]
by Nicholas Laughlin on July 30, 2010
Junot Díaz Junot Díaz: I have to tell you something: when I was young, I read Moby Dick and I always thought, “There is no English like this in the world.” It was a book that contained twenty-five Englishes. And I was like, “Could I write a book that contained every single one of the [...]