Antilles: the weblog of the CRB

Caribbean lit links roundup

• The Literary Saloon posts a link to a review of Havana Blue, by the Cuban writer Leonardo Padura.

• John Mair reports in the Stabroek News on the publication of Guyanese Achievers UK, by Vidur Dindayal, a "who's who" of "the Guyanese mafia" in Britain.

• In the Trinidad and Tobago Newsday, Andre Bagoo looks back at V.S. Naipaul's classic travel narrative The Middle Passage.

• The May 2007 issue of Words Without Borders publishes "Boarding Home", an excerpt from the novel Casa de los náufragos by the Cuban writer Guillermo Rosales (trans. Anna Kushner).

• At the Poetry Foundation blog, Kwame Dawes reports on the finals of Poetry Out Loud. Meanwhile, the Toronto Sun runs a profile of Dawes, in which the poet (and now novelist) reveals that he nearly gave up writing as a university student:

"I took my poems and writings to a teacher at UWI named Wayne Brown," said Dawes, who now teaches English Literature at the University of South Carolina. "He offered a course in creative writing that I wanted to take and he said he had to see my portfolio first. A few weeks later he said I should burn all my writings. And he wasn't joking; he was adamant that I shouldn't write. So I gave up writing."