Commonwealth shortlists....

The 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize shortlists were announced today--see them here. Disappointingly, only one Caribbean title has been shortlisted for the "best book" regional prize in the Canada/Caribbean division: Erna Brodber's new novel The Rainmaker's Mistake (look out for Annie Paul's review in the February CRB). And all the "best first book" shortlistees are Canadian--though one of them is crypto-Caribbean. David Chariandy, whose novel Soucouyant is shortlisted, was born in Canada of Trinidadian ancestry. (Thanks to CRB contributor Jonathan Ali for pointing this out.)

I'm sure some Antilles readers will share my disappointment that more Caribbean writers were not shortlisted for the only major writing prize most are eligible for.... What others do you wish had caught the judges' eyes? What were the other standout Anglophone Caribbean fiction titles of last year? (I'd point to Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw's Four Taxis Facing North, a CRB book of the year.) Tell us in the comments below.

What's going on?

- Thinking of doing a creative writing MFA? Geoffrey Philp offers some advice on how to choose the right programme, and includes suggestions from other writers as well.

- Tobias Buckell muses on the perils of blurbing: "authors get enough rejection in life as it is with their work ... having to turn down a fellow colleague is awkward."

- In yesterday's Stabroek News, Al Creighton turns to the words of Martin Carter for wisdom and solace in the aftermath of the horrific Lusignan murders.

- Aphra Benn's seventeenth-century novel Oroonoko is a crucial early representation of the Caribbean (specifically, Suriname) in literature. A stage adaptation by the Nigerian writer Biyi Bandele has just opened in New York; Charles Isherwood reviews it in the New York Times.

- And Marlon James loves Junot Díaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao--which, as he points out in this blog post, he's reviewed for the February issue of the CRB (running a little late, dear readers, but on its way to subscribers shortly...).

(Indeed, it's because your humble Antilles blogger has been working hard to get the next CRB off to press that posting here has been light of late. What can you look forward to in our next issue, apart from Marlon's zesty piece? Reviews of the latest books by V.S. Naipaul, Erna Brodber, and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, plus an anthology of poems about Che Guevara and the massive catalogue of the Yale Centre for British Art's recent Belisario show.... Also essays by Kei Miller and Tobias Buckell, a review of Roberta Stoddart's retrospective catalogue, a portfolio of contemporary Cuban art, poems by Tanya Shirley, Vahni Capildeo, and Ishion Hutchinson.... If you're not a subscriber, better sign up now!)

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.

Marlon Griffith, Jaime Lee Loy, and Nikolai Noel: La Fantasie

From the pavement outside, 43 Norfolk Street looks like many other modest houses in the east Port of Spain neighbourhood of Belmont. It is a simple single-storey structure with a galvanize roof, decorative fretwork along the eaves, potted palms on either side of the front door. Only the fresh coat of white paint gives away the house's newness. Two weeks ago, this was an empty lot of land, overgrown with razor grass. The little white house has sprung up not quite overnight, but almost. And for three days--or, rather three nights, from 25 to 27 February--it is home not to a respectable working-class family, but to La Fantasie, an ambitious project by three young artists, Marlon Griffith, Jaime Lee Loy, and Nikolai Noel.

The title plays off the name of the posh neighbourhood, just north of here, where the prime minister lives. For most Trinidadians, giving the name "La Fantasie" to a house is a bitter joke, rousing memories of the hundreds of millions spent to construct the new prime ministerial palace, which opened in late 2007. It also pokes sardonic fun at the fantasy of social and economic progress peddled by the current Trinidad and Tobago government. The country is wealthier than ever in its history, and vast sums are spent on public works projects of dubious value, while the crime rate soars and basic infrastructure--for education, health, transport--crumbles.

The windows of the little house at 43 Norfolk Street are tightly shuttered. Just inside the door is a heavy black curtain, which the visitor must grope past. You find yourself in a room crowded with old furniture, its walls, floor, and ceiling painted black, the only light coming from a pair of eerie video projections. Using one of the flashlights hanging from a nail beside the door, you explore the nooks and corners. A trail of blood leading to the fridge, more puddling on the top of the stove. The flashlight has an ultraviolet lamp built in. Flick the switch: drawings appear on the walls and furniture, done in flourescent ink. Evidence of violence, betrayal, despair. A house of horrors. A haunted house. A haunted nation, trapped between a fantasy and a hard place, with a trail of blood leading to...?

Virtual Yardies

You may recall, dear readers, that in the August 2007 CRB I interviewed writer and lit-blogger Geoffrey Philp. Our conversation ranged over various issues confronting Caribbean writers who explore online media, and it ended with Geoffrey's description of his most recently completed work:

NL: You recently announced that you’ve completed the manuscript of a new novel, “Virtual Yardies”, in which the story is told “entirely as blogs, IMs, and e-mails”--with a mystery plot, no less, in which a group of Jamaican bloggers are stalked by a religious zealot. What inspired this, apart from your own blog?

GP: The idea was a spin-off from another recently completed novel, “Zone of Uncertainty”, which is being shopped around. I realised that the “lost daughter” character lived in the world of blogs, so I wanted to carry that idea a bit further. I also asked myself, what would an epistolary novel look like in 2007? The plot needed something to propel it forward, and given the duplicity and anonymity of the web, it seemed a natural fit for the creation of my Jamaican “Cotton Mather” character who will take God’s law into his own hands and kill the unrighteous: “fornicators, adulterers, men who lie with men”.

One important note. Because it’s also a love story, the characters alternate between IMs and emails, depending on their level of intimacy.

Geoffrey's twenty-first-century "epistolary" novel has now gone live, via a series of blogs he's set up, each belonging to one of his fictional characters. Virtual Yardies starts here, and the plot will unfold in the coming days and weeks....

"England suddenly felt tropical"

I took a phone call one mid-morning, when I was lazing in bed, wondering whether to get up and face the bleak wintry day. The phone call was the warm, lyrical voice of the Director of the Sabga Awards, telling me that I was their Arts and Literature laureate for 2008. Needless to say, England suddenly felt tropical, and I arose from my bed.

--David Dabydeen, speaking about his recently announced Anthony N. Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence, in an interview with John Mair in the Stabroek News.

SN: What does getting this award mean to you?

DD: It means that I can have a greater regional presence, in terms of access to media, individuals etc. It will also encourage me to visit more of the islands. It offers me a degree of protection against acts of malice. And I can buy crates of red wine as well.

The money will be spent on paying off some of my mortgage, so I can have a secure home on earth; some will be spent on the poor in Guyana, a kind of bribe to get to heaven.

Caribbean books on NBCC shortlist

More prizes.... this time the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Awards, the finalists for which were announced in San Francisco yesterday. There are no fewer than four Caribbean-related books on the shortlist: Edwidge Danticat's memoir Brother, I'm Dying and Junot Díaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao--both of them CRB books of the year!--plus Trinidadian-American Arnold Rampersad's biography Ralph Ellision and Dominican-American Julia Alvarez's cultural study Once Upon a Quinceanera.

The NBCCA winners will be decided and announced in March.