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.

Photograph by Horia Varlan, posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

It’s shortlist time — for at least a couple of literary awards.

Yesterday the Warwick Prize for Writing announced its 2011 shortlist; Derek Walcott’s White Egrets has advanced to the final six (after winning the T.S. Eliot Prize a couple weeks back). The Warwick Prize is a biennial cross-genre award, open to writing in any form, on a theme which changes with each cycle. This time around, the theme is colour.

Also announced yesterday: the regional shortlists for the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. For purposes of the award, the fifty-odd nations of the Commonwealth are divided into four regions: Africa, Canada and the Caribbean, South Asia and Europe, and South East Asia and the Pacific. Each region has its own panel of judges, who name regional shortlists for best book and best first book. The regional winners (to be announced on 3 March) then vie for the overall prizes in the two categories.

In Caribbean literary circles, at least in recent years, the CWP’s regional shortlist announcements have often triggered a flurry of discussion and concern about the scarcity of Caribbean books making the semi-final cut. In 2010, only one Caribbean book made it onto the Canada/Caribbean best book/best first book shortlists (out of twelve titles total). In 2009 — when your Antilles blogger was a regional CWP judge — it was one out of thirteen. This year, the twelve shortlisted books from our region are all Canadian:

Canada and Caribbean Best Book

The Sky is Falling by Caroline Adderson (Canada)
Room by Emma Donahue (Canada)
The Master of Happy Endings by Jack Hodgins (Canada)
In the Fabled East by Adam Lewis Schroeder (Canada)
The Death of Donna Whalen by Michael Winter (Canada)
Mr Shakespeare’s Bastard by Richard B. Wright (Canada)

Canada and Caribbean Best First Book

Bird Eat Bird by Katrina Best (Canada)
Doing Dangerously Well by Carole Enahoro (Canada)
Mennonites Don’t Dance by Darcie Friesen Hossack (Canada)
Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod (Canada)
The Cake Is for the Party by Sarah Selecky (Canada)
Illustrado by Miguel Syjuco (Canada)

(Perhaps Caribbean readers can take some consolation from the presence of Andrea Levy’s novel The Long Song on the South Asia/Europe shortlist.)

As a Caribbean reader and writer, I’m disappointed that no Caribbean books are in the running for the 2011 CWP. But at the same time I’m disinclined to second-guess the judges’ decisions. If the 2009 round was anything to go by, they read something like a hundred books of fiction in the space of four months, and agonised over the shortlisting process. And it’s worth remembering the facts of demographics: Canada has a population more than five times the size of the Commonwealth Caribbean’s, and Canadian writers publish many more works of fiction each year than do Caribbean writers. (In the middle of the 2009 CWP judging period, I scribbled some thoughts about this.)

Around the time of last year’s CWP shortlist announcement, I participated in a sort of debate on the Caribbean “shortfall” which started when a writer friend made a comment on Facebook. Eleven people weighed in, most of them writers (but because the exchange happened in Facebook’s semi-private zone, I won’t mention names or quote anyone, except myself). There was a rough consensus that the CWP judging system — specifically, the way eligible books are sorted into regions, usually dominated by one or two big countries — systematically disadvantages writers from parts of the world like the Caribbean. The discussion thread covered demographics, the possibility of cultural bias, and the motives of the judges — and of course several people named the Caribbean books they felt should have been shortlisted for the 2010 prize, but weren’t.

I ended my own contribution to the debate with this point:

Isn’t it obvious we need a very well-funded and well-managed set of Anglophone Caribbean literary prizes with substantial cash awards? Anybody with US$5 million to donate to the cause, message me directly and we’ll start setting it up.

Whereupon my writer friend who started the thread promised to buy a lotto ticket.

I assume he didn’t win the jackpot, but the remarkable good news is that, a year later, there are not one but two new Caribbean literary prizes that will be awarded for the first time in 2011. The OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, announced last November, is an annual award for books of poetry, fiction, and literary non-fiction by Caribbean writers, with prize money of US$10,000. It is organised by the Bocas Lit Fest, sponsored by One Caribbean Media, and the inaugural winner will be announced at the end of April. (Your Antilles blogger is a member of the organising committee.)

Meanwhile, the Guyana Prize for Literature — established in 1987 to recognise outstanding books by Guyanese writers, and funded by the government of Guyana — has announced a new biennial Guyana Prize for Literature Caribbean Award. It is open to writers from across the region, with a US$5,000 prize for the winners in three categories: fiction, poetry, and drama. (More information here.) The 2011 entry deadline is 28 February, and winners will be announced in May.

These two new awards don’t replace the CWP, which offers a different kind of recognition. Many Caribbean writers are actually eligible for numerous awards of different sorts and sizes and degrees of fame, depending on where they live or publish — and quite often win them. But there is surely immense potential value in literary awards that focus on the particular diversity of Caribbean writing — organised, funded, and judged by Caribbean people with Caribbean sensibilities, with the immediate aim of promoting Caribbean books, and as rigorous a concern for aesthetic merit as any literary awards anywhere in the world.

I believe these new awards are important acts of self-determination and self-confidence. Of course, it is the quality of the winning books in the years to come that will determine the awards’ credibility and their real value (prize money aside). I’m eagerly looking forward to the announcement of the first shortlists and winners, and to the fresh debates they will provoke.

Photograph by Juhan Sonin, posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

The Caribbean’s rich literary heritage — in multiple languages — has made a contribution to world culture well out of proportion to the region’s small size. We have produced winners of many literary awards, including three Nobel laureates — Saint-John Perse (1960), Derek Walcott (1992), and V.S. Naipaul (2001). But until now there has been no indigenous Caribbean literary award, organised and judged by Caribbean people, of genuinely international scope.

— So say the organisers of the new OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, which was announced this morning in St Augustine, Trinidad.

The OCM Bocas Prize, which will be awarded for the first time in April 2011, will honour the best book of poetry, fiction, or literary non-fiction by a Caribbean writer each year. It comes with a cash award of US$10,000, sponsored by the One Caribbean Media Group. The prize is administered by a new literary festival, the Bocas Lit Fest, based in Port of Spain and with satellite events around Trinidad and Tobago. The first Bocas Lit Fest runs from 28 April to 1 May, 2011, and the OCM Bocas Prize ceremony is scheduled for Saturday 30 April.

(Where does the name come from? Boca is Spanish for mouth, and the Bocas del Dragón — the Dragon’s Mouths — are the narrow sea passages connecting the Gulf of Paria to the Caribbean Sea. For centuries the Bocas were the gateway between Trinidad and the rest of the world. And the mouth is the organ of speech and song — the human body’s gateway for literary expression.)

The CRB is very pleased to be a media partner for both the festival and the prize (and your Antilles blogger and CRB editor is on the organising committee for both). It’s high time we had a major literary festival here at the southern end of the Caribbean, and a literary prize of regional scope and international stature is also long overdue.

The Bocas Lit Fest programme and the list of participating writers will be announced in early 2011. And the OCM Bocas Prize opens to entries on 8 November (you can download the submission guidelines and entry form here). Antilles will post regular updates on both festival and prize in the coming months — and you can also keep up with Bocas news via Twitter.