NGC Bocas Lit Fest

The tradition & historical record

The NGC Bocas Lit Fest is the Trinidad and Tobago literary festival that takes place annually during the last weekend of April in Port of Spain. Inaugurated in 2011, it is the first major literary festival in the southern Caribbean and largest literary festival in the Anglophone Caribbean. A registered non-profit company, the festival has as its title sponsor the National Gas Company of Trinidad and Tobago (NGC). Other sponsors and partners include First Citizens Bank, One Caribbean Media (OCM), who sponsor the associated OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, CODE (sponsors of the Burt Award), and the Commonwealth Foundation. The NGC Bocas Lit Fest also works in collaboration with other international festivals and initiatives, such as the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival and has hosted events showcasing Caribbean writing talent in New York, at the Brooklyn Book Fair, the Harlem Book Fair and elsewhere in the US. In 2012, Bocas partnered with the Edinburgh World Writers Conference as part of a line-up of 14 countries delivering a multinational series of talks marking the 50th anniversary of the five-day meeting of "an impressive, sensational and sometimes scandalous group of writers" at the first Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama. ¹

The Bocas Lit Fest was established in 2011, with the organising team comprising Marina Salandy-Brown, founder and managing director; programme director Nicholas Laughlin, editor of the Caribbean Review of Books and of Caribbean Beat; Funso Aiyejina, prize-winning author and dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Education at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine; Marjorie Thorpe, former professor of literature at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, independent bookseller Joan Dayal of Paper Based Bookshop; Danielle Delon, editor of The Letters of Margaret Mann; local businesswoman Lucita Esau; and Patrice Matthews, a marketing and media professional. In 2019, Rani Lakhan-Narace was appointed as president of the Bocas Lit Fest. The festival's name derives from the Spanish word for mouth, boca – the organ of speech and song and storytelling – while also referencing the Bocas del Dragón (the Dragon's Mouths), which are the narrow straits off Trinidad’s north-west peninsula that connect the Gulf of Paria to the Caribbean Sea. ¹

The Bocas Lit Fest was held for the first time in 2011 – from Thursday, 28 April to Sunday, 1 May – including readings, panel discussions, workshops, film screenings and art exhibitions. Attracting 3,500 attendances over the four days. the festival reflected its founder's aims "to promote literature and publishing in Trinidad and Tobago and the need for Caribbean writing to be celebrated everywhere". The scores of writers taking part in the 2012 festival, both locally based and from abroad, included Fred D'Aguiar, Earl Lovelace, Vahni Capildeo, Chika Unigwe, Monique Roffey, Kenneth Ramchand, Mervyn Morris, Achy Obejas, Rabindranath Maharaj, George Lamming, professor of genetics Steve Jones, Merle Hodge, Rahul Bhattacharya, and Michael Anthony. The festival featured readings, discussions, performances, workshops, screenings of films based on Caribbean writing and music. In 2013, the South+Central NGC Bocas Lit Fest, scheduled to take place annually in November, was inaugurated. In November 2014, NGC Bocas Lit Fest South was hosted by Southern Academy for the Performing Arts (SAPA) in San Fernando, birthplace of the writer Sam Selvon, and the festival commemorated the 20th anniversary of his death. In 2014, "Festival Radio" was inaugurated, to "bring the festival experience to listeners around the globe", as well as attracting "a lot of attention on social media, spurred on in part by the active new media presence of the festival itself". As of 2022, Nicholas Laughlin has been the festival and programme director of the Bocas Lit Fest, with Marina Salandy-Brown remaining as the festival's president. Title sponsor NGC only partially funded the literary festival in 2024, and made no contribution to the 2025 festival. ¹

In February 2017, the Bocas Lit Fest was named as one of "the world's very best literary events" in a list of "20 Best Literary Festivals Around the World That You Should Attend" chosen by Penguin Random House - The Writers' Academy, alongside other prestigious festivals including Hay, Edinburgh and Jaipur. Another accolade, from Jonathan Ford of the Financial Times in May 2017, noted: "In the seven years since Bocas launched, Caribbean writers have been heaped with international accolades — the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, four Forward Prizes for Poetry between 2014 and 2016, and a slew of National Book Awards. Virtually all the writers honoured — including Marlon James, Kei Miller and Vahni Capildeo — were first recognised at this extraordinary little festival in the tropics, a place that is only far away to those who refuse to read." The Bocas Lit Fest, together with its founder Marina Salandy-Brown, was honoured by the International Women's Forum (IWF) in the "Ideas Remaking the World" segment of IWF's World Leadership Conference in November 2021, being described as "the embodiment of Caribbean vibrancy, energy and creativity". ¹

The centrepiece of the NGC Bocas Lit Fest festival is the announcement at an award ceremony of the overall winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Entries for the prize are in the categories of fiction, non-fiction and poetry for a book by a Caribbean writer published in the previous year, with the overall winner being chosen by a panel of judges from the three genre winners. The winners have been: in 2011, Derek Walcott's poetry collection White Egrets, in 2012 Earl Lovelace's novel Is Just a Movie, in 2013 Monique Roffey's novel Archipelago, in 2014 Robert Antoni's novel As Flies to Whatless Boys, in 2015 Vladimir Lucien's Sounding Ground (poetry), in 2016 Olive Senior's The Pain Tree (fiction), in 2017 Kei Miller's Augustown (fiction), in 2018 Jennifer Rahim's Curfew Chronicles (fiction), and in 2019 Kevin Adonis Browne's High Mas (non-fiction). ¹

The Emerging Caribbean Writers Prize, formerly known as the Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize, is jointly administered by the Bocas Lit Fest and the creative writing organisation Arvon, and is an award that allows an emerging Caribbean writer living and working in the Caribbean to devote time to developing or finishing a literary work in-progress, with support from an established writer as mentor. Sponsored by the Hollick Family Charitable Trust for a period of three years (2013–15), and announced at the Bocas Lit Fest in 2012 by Sue Woodford-Hollick, the prize was awarded to writers in three literary genres over consecutive years: fiction in 2013; non-fiction in 2014; and poetry in 2015. The first winner in 2013, for fiction, was Barbara Jenkins of Trinidad & Tobago. The winner in 2014, for non-fiction, was Jamaican Diana McCaulay. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “NGC Bocas Lit Fest”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

NGC Bocas Lit Fest is Trinidad and Tobago literary festiva that takes place annually during the last weekend of April in Port of Spain, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 1 external register, which can be verified through the citation. ²