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Tiphanie Yanique’s 2016 Forward Prize

The Forward Prize judges have chosen Tiphanie Yanique’s Wife (Peepal Tree Press) as the winner of the UK’s top poetry prize for new poets – The Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection.

The Forward Arts Foundation notes that “Tiphanie Yanique (b. 1978, Virgin Islands) has long considered herself a writer, indeed, when asked in school for three words to describe herself, she ‘would say, “Caribbean, girl, writer.” Maybe not always in that order.’ Further, she notes how children ‘speak in metaphor, that they hunt down language as poets do, that they use their vocabulary limitations the way poets might use the limitations of poetic form – to find a way to say something anew.’ Wife, her debut collection, was begun in 2000, but became increasingly focused: the more recently written poems ‘are more clearly about the complexities of heterosexual marriage.’ It has already won the 2016 Bocas Poetry Prize.”

Yanique was taught by Claudia Rankine, winner of the 2015 Forward Prize.

http://www.peepaltreepress.com/blog/whappen/forward-poetry-win-tiphanie-yaniques-wife-peepal-tree-press

Esther Phillips’ Two 2016 Awards

Esther Phillips’ poetry collection Leaving Atlantis has won two 2016 awards. It earned a gold award in the professional category of the NIFCA Literary Competition in Barbados, as well as the Governor General’s Award for Excellence. Leaving Atlantis is a suite of poems that explores the unstable territory between public and private. They are addressed to the Barbadian novelist and thinker, George Lamming. Peepal Tree Press describes the collection as “More than a portrait, fascinating and intimate as it is, of a public man; more than an exploration of the writing of the man for clues about what he might be thinking (and an acceptance of the ultimate mystery and unknowability of the intimate other), this is a suite of poems about the miracle of love, and how it may come at any time.”

http://www.peepaltreepress.com/books/leaving-atlantis

Poet of the Month: Esther Phillips

Call for Papers Special Forum in April 2017 Issue of Journal of West Indian Literature

“Troubling Gender: The Making of Women and Men in Indo-Caribbean Literature and Visual Culture”

This special forum within the April 2017 issue of the Journal of West Indian Literature will feature essays that explore constructions of gender in Indo-Caribbean literature and art. What are the ways in which Indo-Caribbean writers and visual artists of the twentieth- and twentieth-first century have represented the contours and limitations of masculinity and femininity in the context of post-indentureship plantation economies? What have been the imaginative wrestlings with normative understandings of the role of gender when it comes to citizenship, family life, education, activism, diaspora, building cross-racial solidarities, expressions of cultural identity and sexual identity, and writing itself? Essays that are attentive to the shifts in the treatment of such themes from the time of indentureship to now, to pre-1990s writing and to writers and artists from Suriname, Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Lucia, Jamaica, Barbados or other sites of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora are especially welcome. Full essays will be due by 15 January 2017 and should be 6000-7500 words in length. Submissions should be sent to editorial@jwilonline.org

SX Literary Competition

SXLC

The Small Axe Literary Competition encourages the production and publication of Caribbean fiction and poetry. The competition focuses on poetry and short stories from emerging writers whose work centers on regional and diasporic Caribbean themes and concerns. This competition is part of the Small Axe Project’s ongoing commitment to Caribbean cultural production and our mission to provide a forum for innovative critical and creative explorations of Caribbean reality. With this competition, we hope to encourage and support the region’s rich literary heritage, in the tradition of precursors such as Bim (Barbados, 1942), Kyk-over-al (Guyana, 1945), Tropiques (Martinique, 1941), Focus (Jamaica, 1940), Orígenes (Cuba, 1944), La poesía sorprendida (Dominican Republic, 1944), Revista del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña (Puerto Rico, 1945), Conjonction (Haiti, 1946), Revista Casa (Cuba, 1960) and Savacou (Jamaica, 1970).

 

The competition consists of two categories: poetry and short fiction. Two winners are chosen from each category by a distinguished panel of judges.

First Prize: $750; Second Prize: $500

2016 Competition submission deadline: 31 May 2016

Winners of the 2016 competition will be published in Small Axe 53 – July 2017

Writers wishing to compete for a Small Axe Literary Prize must submit the following to litcomp@smallaxe.net:

  • A double-spaced Word document containing: an original, unpublished short story (maximum 7,000 words), or an original selection of unpublished poetry (maximum ten poems, not exceeding ten manuscript pages). Manuscripts must be free of any author information. No PDFs.
  • A separate document with full contact information (name, email address, mailing address and phone) and a biography (not to exceed 250 words), including previously published works should be included with the manuscript email submission.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Journal of West Indian Literature 24, 2 (November 2016) Special issue: Caribbean Ecocriticism

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Journal of West Indian Literature 24, 2 (November 2016)
Special issue: Caribbean Ecocriticism
Guest editor: Elaine Savory

Since the publication of Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture, edited by DeLoughrey, Gosson and Handley in 2005, there have been several interventions into the new field of Caribbean ecocriticism. Important work by scholars including DeLoughrey, Handley, Carrigan and Huggan has helped to foreground the importance of this perspective on considerations of Caribbean literary production. Now we seek to gather new and varied contributions to what is becoming an important body of scholarship.

Articles are invited which treat ecological topics in relation to Caribbean literature and culture. These may be readings of scribal or oral texts considered through a combination of disciplinary, inter-disciplinary, chronological and theoretical lenses.

Please consult JWIL’s submission guidelines and style sheet before sending in articles.

Please submit articles by May 31, 2016 to Elaine Savory at savorye@newschool.edu">savorye@newschool.edu

Launch of JWIL website

We are delighted to launch the online platform of the venerable Journal of West Indian Literature, a print publication since 1986 and one of the very few Caribbean-based literary journals coming out of the University of the West Indies. We have a whole new lineup of editors and advisors, and hope you like our updated look and the ease of access the online JWIL will provide. The current issue, Vol 23, Nos 1 & 2 will be available on open access shortly and you access the contents and abstracts, as well as the complete issue for a limited period; we hope thereafter you will renew your subscription which, please note, is now half of what the print version cost! Do browse the site, familiarize yourself with the history of the Journal and see our guidelines for submissions. We welcome your feedback and continued support.

For the first time: a Jamaican Booker Prize Winner!

Comment

 

Marlon_james

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James was named as the winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction in October. James is the first Jamaican author to win the prize in the Man Booker’s 47-year history. A fictional history of the attempted murder of Bob Marley in 1976, A Brief History of Seven Killings was “an extraordinary book”, said Michael Wood, the chair of judges. Wood, professor emeritus of English and comparative literature at Princeton, said it had quickly dawned on all the judges that James had to be the winner and there was no need for a vote.

James was awarded £50,000 for the prize. He dedicated his win to his late father with whom, he recalled, he used to have Shakespeare duels with as a boy. “Who can have the longest soliloquy … just imagine a father and son in a Jamaican rum bar.” James said it was the riskiest novel he had written, in terms of subject and form and it was “affirming” winning the prize. “I would have been happy with two people liking it.”

The other books shortlisted for the prize were Hanya Yanigahara’s A Little Life; Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island; Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways; Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen; and Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread. The Man Booker Prize promotes the finest in fiction by rewarding the very best book of the year. The prize is the world’s most important literary award and has the power to transform the fortunes of authors and publishers. This is the second year the prize has been open to writers of any nationality writing in English.

read the review in this issue.