Our warmest congratulations to Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, who gained the award for the NGC Bocas Lit Fest’s excellent Caribbean guide of the previous 12 months for her first novel When We Had been Birds. T&T Loop Information stories:
For the second time in a row, a debut author from Trinidad and Tobago has gained the award for excellent Caribbean guide of the previous 12 months.
When We Had been Birds, the primary novel by T&T’s Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, is the winner of the general 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, which comes with a money award of US$10,000, sponsored by One Caribbean Media. It follows the 2022 total winner Pleasantview by Celeste Mohammed, additionally a debut guide. Printed within the UK by Hamish Hamilton and within the US by Doubleday, When We Had been Birds was described by the prize judges as an “astounding” debut, “an formidable story that’s half elegy, half ode.”
It was beforehand named fiction class winner for the OCM Bocas Prize, contending for the general award with the poetry and non-fiction winners.
Bernardine Evaristo, chief choose for the prize, made the announcement in the course of the award ceremony on Saturday 29 April throughout this 12 months’s NGC Bocas Lit Fest. The ceremony additionally honoured poetry winner Anthony Joseph (for his assortment Sonnets for Albert) and non-fiction winner Ira Mathur (for her memoir Love the Darkish Days).
The ceremony, held at historic Mille Fleurs, was additionally the event for the presentation of the 2023 Bocas Henry Swanzy Award for Distinguished Service to Caribbean Letters to Professor Emerita Sandra Pouchet Paquet, a Trinidad-born educational and editor.
Evaristo — winner of the 2019 Booker Prize — was joined on the OCM Bocas Prize ultimate judging panel by Jamaican educational Ronald Cummings, author Richard Georges of the British Virgin Islands, and Guyana-born educational and editor Lisa Outar.
Of their formal quotation, the fiction judges wrote: “There are novelists who’re known as to bear witness. Ayanna Lloyd Banwo is considered one of them…. When We Had been Birds is effortlessly informed in a lyrical model all the author’s personal. Lloyd Banwo’s assured storytelling and poetic prose is magical and hypnotic. When We Had been Birds delivers an intimate, resonant, and unforgettable narrative of affection that makes probably the most wondrous, wild, and mystical elements of our Caribbean really feel dearly acquainted to all of us.”
Now based mostly in Britain, the place she lately accomplished a PhD in inventive and significant writing on the College of East Anglia, Lloyd Banwo is a well-recognized presence on the NGC Bocas Lit Fest stage, the place she has participated through the years within the competition’s New Expertise Showcase and as an occasion host and moderator. When We Had been Birds was beforehand named probably the greatest debut novels of 2022 by the UK Observer.
The 2023 NGC Bocas Lit Fest concludes its three-day programme in the present day, with occasions working all day on the Nationwide Library of Trinidad and Tobago. The finale of the competition is the 2023 First Residents Nationwide Poetry Slam, on the Central Financial institution Auditorium. See www.bocaslitfest.com for additional programme particulars.
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