JWIL is the proud recipient of the 2025 Bocas Henry Swanzy Award for Distinguished Service to Caribbean Letters. We extend our deep thanks to the Bocas Lit Fest team for honoring our work in this way. This is indeed wind at our backs as we herald the 40th year of the JWIL project, fruit of multiple generations of labor and commitment. Below you will find the very generous commendation from the Bocas team. Please support Bocas in turn as they continue to nurture and sustain Caribbean literature and literary community in vital and irreplaceable ways. https://www.bocaslitfest.com/awards/henry-swanzy-award/
“The recipient of the 2025 Bocas Henry Swanzy Award is The Journal of West Indian Literature (JWIL), first published in 1986, in recognition of its indelible role as the most significant scholarly journal dedicated to the field of Caribbean literature — a vital forum for critic and creative debate, and an archive of research and thought including almost every scholar of note working on Anglophone Caribbean literature over three generations.
All the previous winners of the Bocas Henry Swanzy Award have been individuals, rightly honoured for their singular careers. This year’s award breaks new ground, recognising an institution that is also a collective. As we know from the history of the Bocas Lit Fest itself, much pioneering work in the creative field, as in scholarship, is the product of collective and collaborative effort. As we mark the 15th year of the Festival, it is an appropriate moment to expand the scope of the Swanzy Award in this way, and set a new precedent.
JWIL, from its beginning, has been a collaboration among the campuses of The University of the West Indies, rooted in efforts, dating back to the 1970s, to firmly establish and validate West Indian literature as a scholarly field. At the same time, the journal has always had an international remit, as befits a discipline rooted in a particular geography and history but global in its concerns, ambitions, and influence.
Over the decades — first in print and, since 2015, as an entirely online journal — JWIL has published approximately 1,000 pieces: scholarly articles, book reviews, and interviews, as well as occasional creative works. Contributors have ranged from eminent senior scholars — some of them rightly known as parents of West Indian literary studies — to early-career researchers, and indeed publishing a peer-reviewed piece in JWIL has long been considered a rite of passage within the discipline. In recent years, the journal has worked to expand its reach beyond academia to address broader literary audiences, including innovations such as regular social media residencies which allow scholars to share ideas and reflections on their current research, or on a key literary figure.
In the editorial note opening JWIL Vol. 1, No. 1 — published in October 1986 — original editor in chief Mark McWatt explained the initial motivation for founding the journal, as a forum for publishing the increasing number of papers presented annually at another institution, the West Indian Literature Conference. As McWatt plainly wrote: “It was felt that, like other national and regional literatures, West Indian literature deserved its own scholarly journal.” McWatt, long based at The UWI’s Cave Hill campus, was indefatigably assisted from the beginning by Victor Chang of Mona campus, who eventually succeeded him in the formal role of editor in chief. Chang was succeeded in turn by Evelyn O’Callaghan, and the current co-editors in chief are Michael Bucknor and Lisa Outar. These five have successively headed JWIL’s masthead over the years, and deserve particular credit and praise for their vision and leadership. But the Bocas Swanzy Award also encompasses, and is shared by, the dozens of scholars and writers who have served on the editorial board; as editorial advisors; as section editors; as editors of special themed issues; and for that matter as peer reviewers, contributing thousands of hours of their time to the essential and entirely anonymous intellectual labour of evaluating and helping improve the work and thought of their colleagues.
As our region’s literary canon expands, as more and more writers add their voices and ideas to the creative ferment, as Caribbean literature shoots off into ever more diverse and unexpected directions, the need for critical and scholarly analysis and interpretation will be ever more urgent. The institution and the community of JWIL will continue to be crucial, as a forum for debate and an instrument of dissemination — the journal of record, in many ways, for the nation of the imagination that is Caribbean literature.”
