The literary arts took life at Café D’Vinci on the ground floor of the Heron Hotel at Heritage Square last Friday evening. A new publication titled ‘Caribbean Dispatches’ was launched.

St Vincent’s own Phillip Nanton read two pieces he contributed to the anthology and a piece by Shake Keane titled ‘Soufriere’- ‘section one of the Volcano Suite’.{{more}}

Denise de Caires Narain, a Guyanese national and lecturer at the University of Sussex in England also read from two pieces she contributed.

Editor Jane Bryce who teaches African literature and creative writing at UWI’s Cave Hill campus describes the book as an “antidote” to the tourist guidebook on the Caribbean. “All the tourist sees is sun and beaches, they think we live in perfection. I put the book together to show the inside story”, she told SEARCHLIGHT. Bryce also read a piece.

The event was organised by Wade Hadaway of Café D’Vinci and Paula David, attorney-at-law and member of Closet Writers Collective (CWC), a local ad hoc writers’ group that spilled off when Phillip Nanton was the Writer in Residence at the local UWI center.

The contributors are as diverse as the selections of writing presented. Mark McWatt, winner of last year’s Commonwealth Prize for best first book “Suspended Sentence”, Marie Ellen John, author of the groundbreaking novel “Unburnable”, standard bearer Olive Senior and the irrepressible movie maker/storyteller/clown Anthony Winkler of “The Lunatic” fame are only some of the featured contributors.

Historian Lennox Honeychurch is also a contributor and on the cover is a photograph of a mural he painted on a post office in Roseau, Dominica.

The book was published by Macmillan Caribbean and is available on their web site for about EC$65.00.