The 2020 IndyList

THE ArtsEtc Independence Reading List has reached a milestone: it's now in its tenth edition!

The IndyList, as we like to call it, is a selection of 12 Barbadian books to make friends with over the coming year.

Winning Words: Ode to the Bajan Blackbirds

 

BARBADOS' FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY celebrations come and gone and nobody ain’t say yuh cat, yuh dog, ’bout we. Sometimes yuh have to wonder if we is Bajan, too. Gabby had to tell Jack dat the beach belong to he, but it is time that we tell we story.  These fields and skies ’bout here belong to we!  We father get we here. We mother hatch we here. And here belongs to we. 

Winning Words: Taming Dragons in a Soup Bowl

 

A bunch of surfer dudes,
sun-bleached blonde and sun-browned,
inch their way across the rocky shore,
Soup Bowl bound,
tentative as firewalkers
treading unshod on red coals.

Then, with jaws firmly set,
breasts pressed to boards,
these knights of the sea
paddle fearlessly forward, 
to face the fabled dragon waves,
whose lair is the Soup Bowl. 

Winning Words: Home

 

When he comes  
He waits patiently by the door. 
He knocks softly. 
Gently.
He asks,
May I come in? 
Are you at home? 
Is now a good time? 

Winning Words...And Saving Lives

Casting out again.  This edition's cover is by Kai Miller.  

 

A version of the following speech was presented by ArtsEtc Editor Robert Edison Sandiford at the launch of The ArtsEtc NIFCA Winning Words Anthology 2017/2018 held at the Daphne Joseph-Hackett Theatre November 14, 2019.

GOOD EVENING, ladies and gentlemen, artists and patrons, art sponsors and art angels.

I suspect what I’m about to say will sound a little like a vote of thanks.   This is, maybe more so than in past years, inevitable.

Frank Collymore Literary Award Winners In Print

Heather Barker, second-place winner of the 2017 Frank Collymore Literary Award for The Plundering, a collection of stories.  The title story appeared in the anthology So Many Islands, edited by Nicholas Laughlin with Nailah Folami Imoja.  Photo Copyright © 2018 by the Central Bank of Barbados.

Mapping Barbados' LitScape

MAPPING BARBADOS’ LITSCAPE is an ArtsEtc project to track and document Barbados’ very rich and diverse literary tradition.  At our house, the need to better connect readers to this landscape and region has taken many forms over the years.
  

A Review of Watching Out for Mummy

Norma Meek sure knows how to pack a bariffle of pre-teen troubles into 150 pages.

In Watching Out for Mummy, which the author wrote twelve years ago and is still her only novel, we meet 11-year-old Shawn Austin at a moment of transition: he’s about to swap life in Barbados for life in New Jersey in the United States, where his mum lives. 

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