00:00A space, a haven, a home for thinkers, storytellers and readers who keep Caribbean imagination
00:07alive and thriving. That's how Director of One Caribbean Media and General Manager of
00:13the Trinidad Express newspaper Douglas Wilson describes the annual Bocas Lit Fest.
00:20In a region as historically complex and culturally rich as ours, storytelling is not decorative.
00:30It is foundational. It is about identity, how identity is formed and how memory is preserved
00:38and how a sense of shared belonging. Now in its 16th year, OCM remains the literary festival's
00:47longest standing sponsor and patron of its most coveted award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean
00:54Literature.
00:55This year, we are especially encouraged that the prize received 87 entries across three
01:03categories. That number is not just a statistic, it is evidence. Evidence that Caribbean writing
01:11is not static. It is not fading. It is dynamic, diverse and continuously renewing itself. The
01:23creative energy of this region continues to flow undiminished.
01:27Three books are honoured from three categories, poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Then an overall
01:34winner is selected for the US $10,000 prize. The finalists were for Poetry, The World After
01:41Rain by Kinesia Lubrin. For Fiction, The Novel Ibis by Justin Haynes. And for non-fiction, The
01:48Snag, A Mother, A Forest and Wild Grief by Tessa McQuatt. It was McQuatt's work which earned the
01:55prestigious award and highest praise, as Judge Alison Donnell explained.
02:00As this shortlist for non-fiction highlights, the works under consideration this year consistently
02:06drew attention to two themes, familial reconnection and what it means to write of nature in the Caribbean.
02:14Our unanimous winner, Tessa McQuatt's The Snag, A Mother, A Forest and Wild Grief, combines
02:21these two concerns in a work of rare brilliance. The Snag articulates in bold, clear and searingly
02:28beautiful language how our personal grief is intimately connected to planetary loss.
02:33Makquatt, a Guyanese-born, Canada-based author, dedicated the award to her mother, whose advancing
02:41dementia is the premise of this memoir.
02:44Cindy Raguba Tikasing, TV6 News.
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