By Sue-Ann Wayow
FOR the second time in a row, a debut writer from Trinidad and Tobago has won the award for outstanding Caribbean book of the past year.
When We Were Birds, the first novel by Trinidad and Tobago’s Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, is the winner of the overall 2023 One Caribbean Media (OCM) Bocas Lit Prize for Caribbean Literature.
The award comes with a cash award of US$10,000, sponsored by OCM.
Published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton and in the US by Doubleday, When We Were Birds was described by the prize judges as an “astounding” debut and “an ambitious tale that is part elegy, part ode,” Bocas Lit fest stated in a press release on Saturday.
It was previously named fiction category winner for the OCM Bocas Prize, contending for the overall award with the poetry and non-fiction winners.
Bernardine Evaristo, chief judge for the prize, made the announcement during the award ceremony at the Bocas Lit Fest on Saturday.
The ceremony also honoured poetry winner Anthony Joseph for his collection Sonnets for Albert and non-fiction winner president of the Media Association of Trinidad and Tobago (MATT) Ira Mathur for her memoir Love the Dark Days.
Held at historic Mille Fleurs, it was also the occasion for the presentation of the 2023 Bocas Henry Swanzy Award for Distinguished Service to Caribbean Letters to Professor Emerita Sandra Pouchet Paquet, a Trinidad-born academic and editor.
Evaristo, winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, was joined on the OCM Bocas Prize final judging panel by Jamaican academic Ronald Cummings, writer Richard Georges of the British Virgin Islands, and Guyana-born academic and editor Lisa Outar.
In their formal citation, the fiction judges wrote: “There are novelists who are called to bear witness. Ayanna Lloyd Banwo is one of them…. When We Were Birds is effortlessly told in a lyrical style all the writer’s own. Lloyd Banwo’s assured storytelling and poetic prose is magical and hypnotic. When We Were Birds delivers an intimate, resonant, and unforgettable narrative of love that makes the most wondrous, wild, and mystical aspects of our Caribbean feel dearly familiar to all of us.”
Now based in Britian, Banwo’s When We Were Birds was previously named one of the best debut novels of 2022 by the UK Observer.
The 2023 NGC Bocas Lit Fest concludes its three-day programme on Sunday 30 April, with events running all day at the National Library of Trinidad and Tobago. The finale of the festival is the 2023 First Citizens National Poetry Slam, at the Central Bank Auditorium.
The National Gas Company is title sponsor of the festival along with OCM, First Citizens, the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and the Arts, National Lotteries Control Board and the British Council.
Massy Foundation and the University of the West Indies (UWI) are also sponsors.
Last year’s overall winner was Celeste Mohammed, with her debut book Pleasantview.
