Fifteen authors compete for Caribbean’s biggest book prize

Books by 15 authors with roots in eight countries have been shortlisted for the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

Presented annually since 2011, the OCM Bocas Prize is the most coveted award for Caribbean authors, a release from the organising entity states.

It recognises books in three genre categories: poetry, fiction, and literary non-fiction, published by authors of Caribbean birth or citizenship in the preceding year. It is sponsored by One Caribbean Media.

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. Debut books make up a strong proportion of the shortlists, with six first-time authors selected by the judges, the release outlines.

In the second stage of judging for the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize, the judges will announce the winners in the three genre categories on Sunday, 6 April. These will go on to compete for the overall Prize of US$10,000, to be announced on Saturday, May,3, 2025 during the 15th annual Bocas Lit Fest in Port of Spain.

The 2025 Prize is judged by a panel of distinguished Caribbean and international writers and literary professionals. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Anguillan-American author and winner of a Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry, chairs the poetry panel, joined by Canadian-British poet, Alycia Pirmohamed, and Venezuelan poet and translator Adalber Salas Hernández. The fiction panel is chaired by Guyanese-British literary scholar, Denise deCaires Narain, Emeritus Reader in Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Sussex, joined by T&T writer, Celeste Mohammed (herself the winner of the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize), and Trinidadian-British Fleur Sinclair, president of the UK Booksellers Association. The chair of the non-fiction panel, Barbados-born scholar Rinaldo Walcott, is Professor

and Carl V. Granger Chair in Africana and American Studies at the University of Buffalo. He is joined by Gabrielle Hosein, Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, UWI, St. Augustine, and Dominica-born writer, curator, and artist Catherine Lord.

The overall chair of the 2025 cross-genre judging panel is the celebrated Jamaican writer Erna Brodber. Her many honours include a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, a Musgrave Gold Medal from the Institute of Jamaica, and a Prince Claus Award.