The NGC Bocas Lit Fest team hosted a virtual ceremony via its website and social media on 24 April to announce the winner of the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature: Canisia Lubrin.
The Dyzgraphxst brought Lubrin an award of US$10,000, courtesy One Caribbean Media, the region’s largest media house.
In the runners-up positions were Jamaica-born Maisy Card for her debut novel These Ghosts Are Family and Trinidadian Andre Bagoo for his wide-ranging collection of essays The Undiscovered Country. Each was awarded US$3,000.
Lubrin is a writer, editor, teacher and critic and the third Saint Lucia-born writer to win the overall prize, all for poetry. She was also named a winner of a 2021 Windham Campbell Prize. She teaches at the University of Toronto in Canada and will soon become an editor at publisher Penguin Random House.
The announcement was made by Vahni Capildeo, the chief judge of this year’s OCM Bocas Prize. An outstanding poet from Trinidad and Tobago and winner of the Forward Poetry Prize, she was joined on the final judging panel by Jamaican poet and academic Opal Palmer Adisa, Trinidadian-American writer and scholar Rosamond S King, and Malachi McIntosh, editor of the UK-based literary journal Wasafiri.