Casa de las Américas prizewinners

Cuba's Casa de las Américas has announced the winners of its 2008 premios literarios. Most of the prizes are for literature in Spanish, and this year's winners include writers from Argentina, Colombia, Chile, and Mexico. Two of the prizes have gone to Caribbean writers. Haitian Louis-Philippe Dalembert has won the prize for Caribbean literature in French or Creole, for his novel Les dieux voyagent la nuit; and Héctor Díaz Polanco of the Dominican Republic has won the Ezequiel Martínez Estrada essay prize. (The Casa de las Américas has not awarded a prize for literature in English since 2006, when the winner was Mark McWatt's Suspended Sentences.)

Carnival reading

Band of the Year?, by Trinidadian artist Ashraph (see more works from his current show here)

Here in Trinidad, the countdown to Carnival is getting louder and louder. Just four more days to Dimanche Gras.... But CRB readers on foreign shores needn't feel entirely left out. A selection of Carnival-related pieces from our archives, to help assuage the jumbie:

- From the February 2007 CRB: Kenneth Ramchand's essay "On Minshall and reading the mas".

- From August 2006: Mark Lyndersay on Jeffrey Chock's Trinidad Carnival: Photographs.

- From November 2005: Jeremy Taylor on Robert Antoni's novel Carnival.

- From February 2005: Keith Smith on Stefan Falke's book of photographs Moko Jumbies: The Dancing Spirits of Trinidad.

- Also from February 2005: Anu Lakhan on Gordon Rohlehr's A Scuffling of Islands: Essays on Calypso.