Links, links, links

- In the Stabroek News, Al Creighton takes a look at the career of Sabga Award-winning David Dabydeen, and in the Trinidad Newsday Kevin Baldeosingh reports on Dabydeen's talk last Monday at the National Library in Port of Spain:

“Books are what we are. Long after we’ve forgotten who the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago is, we’ll remember Naipaul,” Dabydeen said. He also spoke about the friendly rivalry between the writers of the 1950s and 60s, although when he brought up Lamming, he paused and said, “Maybe I shouldn’t talk about this in public. It’s not being taped, is it?”

- In the New York Times Book Review, Paul Devlin reviews a new biography of Marcus Garvey, Negro with a Hat, by Colin Grant.

- Oops, I missed this one a little over a week ago: Ian Thomson's review, in the Independent, of Kei Miller's new novel:

The Same Earth, a humorous, bittersweet fiction, combines the fantastical realism of Márquez with the domestic comedy of Andrea Levy, to create an island saga richly brocaded in folklore and West Indian custom. Miller, himself a Jamaican, is a name to watch.

- And the Calabash International Literary Festival has released its 2008 schedule. No Junot Diaz, alas, but this year's authors include Lorna Goodison, Erna Brodber, Thomas Glave, Kei Miller, Margaret Cezair-Thompson (all Jamaican), the American poets Yusef Komunyakaa and Cornelius Eady, and, for the headline act, Derek Walcott. Your humble Antilles blogger will be in Treasure Beach the weekend of 23 to 25 May for Calabash 2008, and you can look out for not-quite-live reports here--with photos by Georgia Popplewell, just like last year.

- Speaking of Diaz, his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has won another prize--the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, "the premier prize for books that grapple with race".

- And speaking of Walcott, the current New Yorker includes a new poem of his, In Italy:

Roads shouldered by enclosing walls with narrow
cobbled tracks for streets, those hill towns with their
stamp-sized squares and a sea pinned by the arrow
of a quivering horizon, with names that never wither
for centuries and shadows that are the dial of time....