Bocas LitFest: the Trinidad & Tobago Literary Festival

Tomorrow, the first Bocas Lit Fest – Trinidad & Tobago Literary Festival kicks off! And Discover Trinidad & Tobago and Caribbean Beat are proud to be a part of it as media sponsors. 

The Festival was founded by the dynamic Marina Salandy-Brown, and among the organisers are Caribbean Review of Books editor Nicholas Laughlin and co-founder and Managing Director of MEP, Jeremy Taylor.

From left to right: Edwidge Danticat; Derek Walcott;
and Tiphanie Yanique

The inaugural festival is packed with some 50 events over four days, running from Thursday 28 April until Sunday 1 May. 

Some of the highlights include:

• The announcement of the 2011 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the first major regional award recognising Caribbean writers of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. The short list includes White Egrets, by Derek Walcott (St. Lucia) in the poetry category; How to Escape from a Leper Colony, by Tiphanie Yanique (US Virgin Islands) in the fiction category; and Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, by Edwidge Danticat (Haiti/USA) in the non-fiction category
• A celebration of the 25th anniversary of Peepal Tree Press, a leading publisher of Caribbean fiction and poetry, featuring founder Jeremy Poynting, the launch of new Peepal Tree titles, and readings by Peepal Tree authors 
• A Friday-night "poetry crawl" in Woodbrook, taking poetry off the page and the podium and into some of Port of Spain’s most popular nightspots.  
• Tributes to Trinidadian Keith Smith and Martiniquan Édouard Glissant, two beloved and recently deceased writers — one a master of the newspaper column, the other a champion of the Caribbean’s unique hybrid culture. 
• The Bocas Debate: first in an annual series of a high-level discussions of burning public-interest topics. This year’s subject: "Press vs. Government: the freedom to print what?"
• "The lives of others", a conversation about the privileges and perils of biography, featuring the prizewinning biographers of V.S. Naipaul, Ralph Ellison, and Frank Collymore, which includes Caribbean Beat editor Judy Raymond among the panellists
• Readings by celebrated Caribbean authors, discussion panels, workshops, performance poetry and open mic sessions, film screenings, music, a full programme of events for children, and more.

So find your niche and dive in! Here are the details of the jam-packed schedule:

• Wednesday 27 April (festival warm-up): programme
• Thursday 28 April: programme
• Friday 29 April: programme
• Saturday 30 April: programme
• Sunday 1 May: programme