The 2022 NGC Bocas Lit Fest, happening from April 28 to Could 1, is organized round an overarching theme this yr: “4 Days to Change the World.” All occasions might be streaming and accessible from anyplace on this planet via numerous platforms: the literature pageant’s web site, bocaslitfest.com, in addition to Fb and YouTube. The Bocas Henry Swanzy Award for Distinguished Service to Caribbean Letters this yr goes to Funso Aiyejina and Merle Hodge (see under). Competition director Nicholas Laughlin writes:
FOUR DAYS TO CHANGE THE WORLD: Right here within the Caribbean, like in all places else on this planet, we’re residing via a time of extraordinary change — social and cultural, technological and environmental. Two years of the COVID-19 pandemic have compelled us to alter the way in which we work and play, even our easiest day by day routines. In the meantime the specter of international local weather change is looming, and up to date occasions have compelled us to confront social inequalities in dire want of change. To outlive, we have to adapt. Our writers have risen to those many challenges, with a number of latest books that examine concepts about change in each sphere and discipline — whether or not private or collective, political or cultural. Via genres as various as fiction, poetry, and life-writing, modern Caribbean writers are courageously exploring the adjustments we’re all residing via, and the adjustments we’d like with a purpose to create a extra simply society. At our twelfth annual pageant, we’re following their lead, with a particular programme of 4 consecutive evenings, every with its personal thematic focus, including as much as a much bigger story of how concepts, tales, and phrases can change the world for the higher, by specializing in a few of the most significant books and authors of the previous yr.
2022 BOCAS HENRY SWANZY AWARD: With our bodies of labor that span borders and many years, and having helped to launch a few of the most proficient modern Caribbean and diaspora writers, Funso Aiyejina and Merle Hodge have performed an unmistakable position in shaping the area’s literary panorama. Now the Bocas Lit Fest is honouring them with the annual Bocas Henry Swanzy Award for Distinguished Service to Caribbean Letters.
Based in 2013, the Bocas Henry Swanzy Award is called for the late BBC World Service radio producer Henry Swanzy. Irish by delivery, Swanzy was a catalysing determine within the growth of contemporary West Indian literature, having labored from 1946 to 1954 as producer of the influential Caribbean Voices radio programme, initially based by Jamaican Una Marson.
The Bocas Lit Fest created the award in Swanzy’s reminiscence to honour and have fun the contributions of editors, broadcasters, publishers, critics, and others who’ve devoted their careers to creating Caribbean literature, typically behind the scenes. Recipients of the Bocas Henry Swanzy Award are chosen by the pageant’s organising committee and honoured annually on the NGC Bocas Lit Fest.
The 2022 awardees, Funso Aiyejina and Merle Hodge, are being recognised for their work over greater than twenty years as artistic writing academics and mentors, particularly via the influential Cropper Basis Writers’ Workshop. Aiyejina and Hodge led the residential workshop from its founding in 2000, guiding and mentoring individuals from throughout the Caribbean, lots of whom have gone on not solely to be revealed, however acclaimed for his or her books. As well as, Aiyejina was the founding father of the artistic writing MFA (Grasp of Superb Arts) programme on the College of the West Indies’ St. Augustine campus, the primary degree-granting programme in artistic writing within the Anglophone Caribbean.
Born in Nigeria and resident in Trinidad and Tobago since 1989, Funso Aiyejina is a celebrated poet, brief story author, playwright, and scholar — a former Dean of Humanities and Schooling, and present professor emeritus at UWI, St. Augustine. He began his educating profession at Obafemi Awolowo College in Nigeria, and was lecturer and later professor at UWI from 1990 to 2014. Aiyejina received the 2000 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Greatest First Ebook within the Africa area for his brief fiction assortment The Legend of the Rockhills and Different Tales. As a scholar, he’s particularly well-known for his work on Earl Lovelace, together with a biography and movie. [. . .]
Lauded as one of many first Black Caribbean ladies to publish a serious work of fiction — her basic 1970 novel Crick Crack, Monkey — Merle Hodge is a beloved fiction author, literary critic, social and cultural activist, and retired lecturer within the School of Humanities and Schooling at UWI, St Augustine. Throughout her UWI profession throughout two campuses, she taught French, West Indian and African Diaspora Literature, and Artistic Writing even earlier than the founding of the MFA programme.
Each Aiyejina and Hodge proceed to write down and publish — every has revealed a brand new e-book up to now two years — however the Bocas Henry Swanzy Award recognises their essential parallel work as academics and mentors of youthful authors, and their dedication to nurturing a technology of writers grounded in Caribbean literary custom and language, exploring the area’s social complexities. [. . .]
For full program of occasions, go to https://www.bocaslitfest.com/
For extra info, see https://www.bocaslitfest.com/2022/04/02/announcing-the-recipients-of-the-2022-bocas-henry-swanzy-award/