Many congratulations to Anthony Vahni Capildeo and Christine Roseeta Walker, who have both been shortlisted in the poetry category of this year's OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature with their books Polkadot Wounds and Coco Island!


The OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature is awardes annually for literary books by Caribbean writers. Books are judged in three categories: poetry, fiction and literary nonfiction. There is a panel of three judges for each genre category, who determine category shortlists and winners. The three category winners are then judged by a panel of four judges, consisting of the chairs of the category panels and the prize chair, who determine the overall winner.

To commemorate the landmark 15th year of the Prize, the shortlists for the three genre categories have each been increased to five books, with a total of 15 Caribbean books in contention for the overall award.

The author of the book judged the overall winner will receive an award of US$10,000. The other category winners will receive US$3,000.

The full shortlist is available here.

Very well done to Christine and Anthony, and all the other shortlisted writers and publishers!

Polkadot Wounds by Anthony Vahni Capildeo is a delight, wrestling with life in our restless times. Capildeo entices us to enter conversations with others (dead and living), amongst glimpsing reflections of encounters. Landscapes become 'landskips', playing on traditions of travel and nature writing, childlike spontaneity and movement across gaps. Dante's Divine Comedy frames untimely deaths and breakthroughs of joy, during the pandemic and in queer and far-flung communities. The title of the book is inspired by the stones of the ruined Norman castle in Launceston, Cornwall, and the local martyr, St Cuthbert Mayne, where Capildeo was writer-in-residence with the Charles Causley Trust.

Christine Roseeta Walker's first book is set entirely in Negril, Jamaica. Coco Island presents a compelling cycle of poems, attentive to the undertow and hidden forces that shape a place and its people. In narrative poems, in songs, in fables, in comic scenes, ghost stories and vivid character sketches – especially of girls and women – Walker artfully lays bare how economic necessity, religious belief, illness and addiction reach far into the structures of family life and community. Piecing together the isolated lives of those left behind as the island modernises, her fearless, memorable poems chart the devastation of a world.