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21 Quick Facts about Bajan Lit

 

1. The Frank Collymore Literary Award, launched in 1998, is the most lucrative writing prize in Barbados, with the top “Colly” winner receiving BDS$10,000.00 (US$5,000.00).

2. The National Independence Festival of Creative Arts (NIFCA) Literary Competition produced its first Winning Words anthology of medal-winning entries in 1999.

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The ArtsEtc NIFCA Winning Words Anthology, 2019-2020, Cover.
Latest Winning Words Focuses on "Our Uncertain Times"

....Like the world, and its words, are on fire.  This edition's cover is again by Kai Miller.     

 

The following is from the back cover of The ArtsEtc NIFCA Winning Words Anthology 2019/2020.

THESE ARE NOT normal times we’re in.  And they are changing fast.

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The 2022 IndyList, Partial (2021) by Robert Edison Sandiford.
The 2022 IndyList

 

NO, YOU HAVEN'T missed a thing.  We've shifted the presentation of the ArtsEtc Independence Reading List to the top of the upcoming year instead of leaving it at the end of the previous one.  So you're in the right place: this is the offering for 2021 moving into 2022.  Or, more simply put, for the next twelve months.

To recap, the IndyList, as we like to call it, is a selection of 12 Barbadian books to make friends with over the coming year.   This is its eleventh edition.

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Barbadian Poet Linda M. Deane, July 2021.
Linda M. Deane 2020 Frank Collymore Literary Award Winner

2020 Frank Collymore Literary Award winner Linda M. Deane.  Photo Copyright © 2021.

 

THE 23rd FRANK COLLYMORE LITERARY AWARDS were presented entirely virtually for the first time on February 14, 2021. Because of COVID-19 restrictions, the ceremony was aired via a live stream that used prerecorded readings by the winners in various locations across the island.  

All of the winners were poets this year, with the Prime Minister’s Award going to a prose writer for a YA novel.  

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Cherie Jones, the author or How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, published in February 2021.
The Beautiful and the Authentic: A Review of How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

 Photo Copyright © 2021 by Hachette Book Group.  

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A Review of Riff: The Shake Keane Story

Riff: The Shake Keane Story (Papillote Press, 164 pp., paperback, 2021) is the biography of the Vincentian poet-jazz musician Ellsworth McGranahan “Shake” Keane (1927-1997). Keane is St Vincent’s best-known (perhaps its only) poet with an international reputation. Less known is the fact that he is most likely St Vincent’s most accomplished jazz musician. Written by Barbadian-based Vincentian author Philip Nanton, this biography, though brief, is thoroughly researched, and is erudite in content and style.

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The 2020 IndyList, lino print image entitled The Edge (2018) by Izora Devonish.
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.

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A Review of Black Dogs and the Colour Yellow

Christine Barrow, who made Barbados her home for nearly fifty years, delivers a masterclass in short fiction’s powers of subtlety with her first book, Black Dogs and the Colour Yellow. These stories do not declaim so much as they stitch, quietly and with stunning resolve, a Barbadian tapestry as complicated as it is unsentimentally beautiful.

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A Review of Pick of the Crop

Nailah Folami Imoja's novel Pick of the Crop (Heinemann, 106pp., paperback, 0-435-98966-9) opens with a familiar, Bajan, boys-on-the-block scene, complete with spliff and tamarind tree.  For a book geared toward young adult readers, this is somewhat surprising.  There is the obligatory condemnation, which comes from our hero, Leroi Baines, even as the young offenders puff on.  "I don't know why y'all always burning out wunna brains with that junk..." and "Wunna need to try and keep you mind and body clean.  How you expect to get ahead?"  But the first few pages resonate with other

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THE GATHERING: Barbados’ strike force against the COVID-19 pandemic  

 

PROLOGUE: NEVER RETREAT, NEVER SURRENDER

Story, Script and Illustrations by the Research Methods Class of 2020

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