The OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature — which will be awarded for the first time this year — has announced its 2011 longlist of ten books, in three genre categories:

Poetry

= Elegguas, by Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados) — Wesleyan
= A Light Song of Light, by Kei Miller (Jamaica) — Carcanet
= White Egrets, by Derek Walcott (St. Lucia) — Faber

Fiction

= The Loneliness of Angels, by Myriam Chancy (Haiti/Canada) — Peepal Tree
= Redemption in Indigo, by Karen Lord (Barbados) — Small Beer
= The Amazing Absorbing Boy, by Rabindranath Maharaj (Trinidad and Tobago/Canada) — Knopf Canada
= How to Escape a Leper Colony, by Tiphanie Yanique (US Virgin Islands) — Graywolf

Non-fiction

= Beauty and Sadness, by Andre Alexis (Trinidad and Tobago/Canada) — House of Anansi
= Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, by Edwidge Danticat (Haiti/USA) — Princeton
= The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief, by V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad and Tobago/UK) — Picador

As I’ve mentioned before, your Antilles blogger is on the organising committee for the OCM Bocas Prize, so it gives me much satisfaction to report that we’ve reached this stage in the judging process. I’m also pleased it’s such a diverse list, with writers representing six Caribbean countries, and ranging from two Nobel laureates (Walcott and Naipaul, of course) to two debut authors (Lord and Yanique).

There’s more information about the longlist here, and full details of the prize here. The three genre category winners — making up the shortlist for the overall prize — will be announced on 28 March, and the OCM Bocas Prize ceremony will be one of the highlights of the Bocas Lit Fest at the end of April.

• Revival of Paul Simon/Derek Walcott’s Capeman opens in NYC in August: http://bit.ly/bxdLLX

• Trinidadian Marlon Griffith wins 2010 Commonwealth Connections international arts residency: http://bit.ly/9y7e2o

• Announcing @Carifringe: an annual regional arts festival hosted in Nassau, launching October 2010: http://bit.ly/aXkXpw

• Bahamian Christian Campbell shortlisted for Forward Prize for best first collection: http://bit.ly/9cahf2

• Draconian Switch 13: Cozier, Smailes, Ashraph, Rawlins, Vasquez, Bolai: http://bit.ly/bhZeLZ

• George Elliott Clarke on the Calabash poetry anthology, So Much Things to Say: http://bit.ly/aR97gM

• Mediapart on Anthony Joseph’s recent performance in Arles (report in French + video footage): http://bit.ly/bCCu2j

• Lesley McDowell reviews Kei Miller’s The Last Warner Woman in the Glasgow Herald: http://bit.ly/csxOH7

The CRB’s editorial engine is running again, though with the occasional cough and splutter — we’re not yet at cruising speed, as it were. But our May 2010 issue — our first in a year — is under way, with the first new reviews appearing at the start of the month and another batch published this week. Eventually we’ll settle into a more or less weekly schedule, with new material going live on the site every Monday.

Thus far, the May issue includes reviews of Anthony Winkler’s latest novel, Crocodile, and Geoffrey Philp’s book of short stories Who’s Your Daddy?; of collections of poems by Grace Nichols and Jennifer Rahim; of a book of interviews with Caryl Phillips, and of a literary study called Exhibiting Slavery: The Caribbean Postmodern Novel as Museum. We’ve also published the first instalment of a multi-part essay by Vahni Capildeo, recounting her recent visit to India for a literary conference — I hope this will be just the first in a series of longer prose narratives made possible by the CRB’s new format, in which we are unrestricted by printed page counts. And this week we’ve also published two new poems by Kei Miller.

The first of these, “This Zinc Roof”, is a sort of ode to the bare sheets of galvanised zinc — “this portion / Of ripple; this conductor of midday heat” — that both shelter and trap so many residents of the Caribbean’s desperate and depressed urban communities. When we planned to publish the poem this week, we had no idea that the events now unfolding in Kingston would give its poignant verses such a sharp and timely edge:

This that the poor of the world look up to
On humid nights, as if it were a crumpled
Heaven they could be lifted into….

This clanging of feet and boots,
Men running from Babylon whose guns
Are drawn against the small measure

Of their lives….