Search results for ""Peepal Tree Press Ltd""

South Eastern States is a poetry collection centred around travel – ranging from his native Barbados, across the Southern States of the US (especially his home-state of Georgia), and on to Brazil. To share Anthony Kellman's journeyings is to delight in his eye for 'our small deep gestures', the 'polyphony in the common salt' of human interaction.There are telling observations on both the tenacity of the old and the curiosity of the very young. There are savagely witty tales about the pretension and philistinism still rife on the island of his birth, as well as poems of homage to those authors, like George Lamming, who strive to reverse the trend. Most of all, though, there is an overwhelming urge to sing songs of praise.Anthony Kellman was born in Barbados in 1955. At eighteen he moved to London, drawing up close links with the Poetry Society and the likes of Alan Brownjohn, James Berry and Peter Forbes. He is the author of seven collections, including Limestone (2008) and Wings of a Stranger (2001), and two novels, The Houses of Alphonso (2004) and The Coral Rooms (1994), all published by Peepal Tree Press. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Augusta College, Georgia.

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From the 1930s to the new century, Doux Thibaut, one of Merle Collins' most memorable characters, negotiates a hard life on the Caribbean island of Paz. As a child there is the shame of poverty and illegitimacy, and there are the hazards of sectarianism in an island divided between Catholic and Protestant, the rigidity of a class and racial system where, if you are black, your white employer is always right—and only the ladies live upstairs. Doux confronts all such challenges with style and hidden steel.We leave Doux as an old lady moving between the homes of her children in Boston and New York, wondering whether they and her grandchildren really appreciate what her engagement with life has taught her. In these tender and moving stories, Merle Collins demands that we do not forget such lives. If ghosts appear in several of the later stories, they are surely there to warn that amnesia about the past can leave disturbed and restless spirits behind.In addition to the Doux stories, this collection restores to print an earlier 'Paz' story, Rain Darling, and their juxtaposition contrasts two very different responses to the hazards of life.Merle Collins is Grenadian. She is the author of two novels, a collection of short stories and two previous collections of poetry. She teaches Caribbean literature at the University of Maryland.

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Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize 2012.Dulcinea Evers, a young Jamaican artist who has reinvented herself in the USA as the flamboyant Cinea Verse, has died in unclear circumstances. But who was Dulcinea? Her friend, Cheryl, who is carrying her ashes back to New York from her Jamaican funeral, has one story, but the narratives of the other people in Dulci's life suggest that not even Cheryl's version is the whole one. In the words of Dulci's angry, disappointed father, her ineffectual mother, her middle-aged married lover and the angry wife who came after her with a machete, the art critic husband whom she used to get American residency, and Cheryl, the friend who has her own secrets, facets of Dulci begin to emerge: talented, reckless and, as we see when Aunt Mavis begins to speak, fundamentally alone. And it is Aunt Mavis, the solitary and reluctant seer, who understands the true challenge of Dulci's gift.In telling Dulci's story through those who speak to her, Alecia McKenzie has skilfully organised a narrative that is both multi-layered in offering deepening cycles of understanding, and has the onward thrust of progressive revelation. There is space, too, for readers to come to their own conclusions.Alecia McKenzie was born and grew up in Kingston, Jamaica. Her short stories, Satellite City, won the Commonwealth Writers regional prize for the best first work in 1993.

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Trinidadian author Ismith Khan (1925-2002) is celebrated in this new critical study, which sheds invaluable and entertaining light on his life, his short stories and his three novels: the semi-autobiographical The Jumbie Bird (1961), The Obeah Man (1964), which was adapted as a play for the BBC, and The Crucifixion, published by Peepal Tree Press in 1987. Khan's literary accomplishments are given in-depth treatment, particularly his skill in representing the diversity of Trinidadian culture across language, generation, ethnicity and class. Clear and well-documented, the survey gives a persuasive case for the re-evaluation of this great writer's work."Khan's ear for dialect and his ability to render it in print made his novels lasting successes." – The New York TimesRoydon Salick is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Liberal Arts at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad. He is the author of The Novels of Samuel Selvon: A Critical Study (2001).

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For over thirty years, Rupert Roopnaraine has fought a political battle for democracy, social justice, racial harmony and civil society. This collection of essays ranges across politics, literary pursuits, visual arts, social commentary, memoirs and tributes. They encompass Guyana, the wider Caribbean, including the US invasion of Grenada (which Roopnaraine witnessed first-hand), and the international socialist movement. The title comes from a Martin Carter poem written in grief over the assassination of the scholar-politician and WPA leader Walter Rodney. Essays on Martin Carter, Edgar Mittelholzer, AJ Seymour, Kyk-over-Al, the lexicographer Richard Allsop, and the artists Philip Moore, Winston Strick, Ras Ishi, Ras Akyem and Stanley Greaves reveal yet again that there are few Caribbean critics who write with such grace and insight. Born in 1943 in Georgetown, Guyana, Rupert Roopnaraine is one of the leading Caribbean intellectuals of his generation. Having studied in Cambridge and New York, he joined the Working People's Alliance in 1977. He has been a member of the Guyanese Parliament for many years. His book Primacy of the Eye: The Art of Stanley Greaves was published by Peepal Tree in 2003. He also wrote the introduction to Peepal Tree's 2010 edition of Edgar Mittelholzer's Shadows Move Among Them.

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If one wanted to find out what Trinidad and the Caribbean have been like in the last decades of the 20th century, there would be no better place to look than the stories in this collection. Whilst many of the writers of his generation reconstructed the Caribbean world from distance and memory, publishing primarily for a metropolitan audience, Brown's stories began as publications in his weekly newspaper column with a very substantial popular audience. But there is nothing ephemeral about this work, because Brown invested these pieces with all a major poet's delight in the power of language and with a craftsman's meticulous concern for their structure as short stories. Frequently, the line between fiction and actuality is deliberately blurred as Brown invokes the shaping light of memory to resurrect the people and places he had known or loved (or merely imagined). Wayne Brown is no less a character in these fictions than Philip Roth and his various avatars are in his novels. What the reader encounters in the collection is Brown's striking ability to portray people and tell stories that are particular and unique, but which cohere to form an unrivalled portrait of a rapidly changing society.Best known as one of the Caribbean's most incisive commentators, Wayne Brown raised a weekly newspaper column to a literary art. Between 1984 and 2009, some 3,500 editions of his column "In Our Time" appeared in Trinidadian and Jamaican newspapers.

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Shortlisted for the Guyana Prize for Literature 2011.Pairing Caribbean wounds with the grievances of political Islam, this intriguing novel begins as a sad story of unrequited love on a Guyanese sugar estate that descends into the obsessive world of stalking and the temptations of Jihad. Told through the eyes of Albert Aziz, a Guyanese Indian Muslim, the story opens with his boyhood memory of falling from a tree and being badly injured, after which he develops a compelling attraction to a young Chinese girl, Alice Wong, who lives on the same sugar estate. Now, years later, Aziz is a highly paid engineer in the Canadian nuclear industry. Although he has a new and prosperous life, he still nurtures racial resentments about the way he was treated as a child and has become a supporter of radical Islam. He also begins to fixate again on Alice and tracks her down. He finds that she is divorced and living in England and asks her to marry him. Though Aziz is telling the story, it is clear that Alice's apprehension is slowly mounting as she fears the consequences of what might happen if she turns him down.Jan Lowe Shinebourne was born in Guyana and now lives in Sussex, U.K. She is writing her fourth work, a family saga spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; set in China, Europe and the Caribbean.

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Set in Barbados in the 1940s, this is a novel of Caribbean childhood with several key features, in addition to the fresh vigour of the young Austin Clarke's style. It is one of the most angry books on the attempted destruction of innocence and hope by the colonial education system in which savage beatings play a distressing part. It is one of the first novels of childhood to focus on the role of emigration on parental absence. Milton Sobers' father is in the USA and his stories of Harlem make Milton want to leave Barbados and join him. Milton's response is to run away in the hope that he can escape his stepfather and even reach Harlem.Austin C. Clarke is hailed as a pioneer of Caribbean-Canadian literature and is one of Canada's most prolific, if not well known, writers.

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When the charismatic Isaac Shepherd returns to the island of San Christobal it is lead by an independence movement that for a time unites all the island's diverse groups – Africans, Indians and Chinese – against the colonial establishment. But each group relates in different ways to colonialism and their failure to communicate openly about those differences leads to mutual suspicions that provide their enemies with the means to destroy them. Parallel to the world of the political leaders is the tight bond between their sons, including the white son of the reactionary chief of police, and Ma Shepherd, Isaac Shepherd's mother. They are the Age and Innocence of the novel's title, though the nature of innocence is thoroughly deconstructed. In what is still one of the most insightful explorations of the nature of race and ethnicity in colonial and postcolonial societies, Lamming reaches far beneath the surface of ethnic difference into the very heart of the processes of perception, communication and coming to knowledge. In a classic novel that is tense and tragic in its denouement and throughout deeply enquiring, Lamming has written one of the half dozen most important Caribbean novels of all time.George Lamming was born in Barbados in 1927. He is the author of several of the most important Caribbean novels of all time.

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In this collection of short stories, meditations and prose poems, Brenda Flanagan celebrates the capacity of women to endure with resilience, stoicism and, frequently, humour. The stories give a vivid picture of an island very like Trinidad, across the past fifty years, touching on women of many ages and ethnicities, of women in town or country, or in flight from the hard circumstances of island life and in search of material security in the USA.Above all, Brenda Flanagan penetrates to the heart of Trinidad's picong (satirical) culture, and the way that playing with the word sustains a sense of self and community relationship."What the best musicians do with wood and brass and air, Brenda Flanagan does with words – she gives them voice and life... And there you are, on the island, in the midst of it all." Janet Kauffman"Brenda Flanagan joins Marshall, Danticat ... Caribbean American women who've done so much to add new colors and rhythms to an American prose that can often be dull and gray..." Ishmael ReedTrinidad born Brenda Flanagan teaches creative writing, Caribbean and African American Literatures at Davidson College, North Carolina. She is also a United States cultural ambassador, and has served in Kazakstan, Chad and Panama.

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The short story has been integral to the development of Caribbean literature, and continues to offer possibilities for invention and reinvigoration. As the most comprehensive study of its kind, this important and timely volume explores the significance of the short story form to Caribbean cultural production across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The twenty original essays collected here offer a unique set of inquiries and insights into the historical, cultural and stylistic characteristics of Caribbean short story writing. The book draws together diverse critical perspectives from established and emerging scholars, including Shirley Chew, Alison Donnell, James Procter, Raymond Ramcharitar and Elaine Savory. Essays cover the publishing histories of specific islands; intersections of the local, global and diasporic; treatments of race and gender; language, orality and genre; and cultural contexts from tourism to calypso to cricket.Mark McWatt is the recently retired Professor of West Indian literature at UWI, Cave Hill. He is joint editor of the Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse(2005).The EditorsDr Lucy Evans is Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature at the University of Leicester. She has published a number of articles on Caribbean and black British writing, and is currently completing a monograph entitled Communities in Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories.Emma Smith has a PhD in narrative theory and contemporary fiction from the University of Leeds. She has lectured in post/colonial literature and history at Leeds and Leeds Metropolitan universities and currently works on the editorial team at Peepal Tree.

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A chance encounter at Kennedy Airport with her ex-husband, Saliou Wade, takes Magdalene and their now adult daughter, Khadi, on a visit to him and his new family in Senegal. Magdalene is understandably nervous about the return, remembering the pain of the mutual cultural incomprehension – she is a St Lucian – that ended the marriage almost twenty years before; but Khadi refuses to go without her. In Senegal, whilst the now cosmopolitan Saliou appears to exist comfortably in multiple worlds, there are more complex relationships to manage with members of his large extended family. But the sensitivities are not merely social and cultural. A visit Khadi and her half-sister Maimouna make to the slave port of Gorée has consequences that lay bare unfinished business between West Indians and Africans, between Magdalene and Saliou, and Khadi and her parents. And when Khadi and Hassim, Saliou's brother-in-law, are drawn together, those looking on must wonder whether history will repeat itself.Angela Barry lives and works in Bermuda. Her writing has been published in The Massachusetts Review and she is the recipient of a James Michener Creative Writing Fellowship.

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A retired fisherman, Monty Cupidon, encounters a naked, bloodied and traumatised woman standing at the cross-roads. He offers comfort and takes her in. Suffering from amnesia, she cannot tell him anything about herself. The only clues are the signs that she has once worn a wedding ring, has a butterfly tattoo and red nail polish on her toes. In the absence of memory, he names her Esther. So begins a remarkable sequence of poems that explores many dimensions of liminality. Back of Mount Peace occupies a space between lyric and narrative, between reflection and story. It explores the space between body and mind, making Esther's halting discovery of her self through her body, which like a tree bears its indelible history and, unlike the mind, 'doesn't forget its grievances', work both as moving narrative device and a deeply sensed and sensual reminder of the physicality of existence. Above all, this is a sequence that explores a relationship which begins in a primal Edenic space of innocent discovery in which, as Monty hopes, 'the hallelujah's of new love will begin', but which, like all relationships must enter history, the decay of time and the corruptions of knowledge. In the use of rhyme and other patterns of sound, Back of Mount Peace shows an exceptional delicacy of formal control that constantly reinforces the poem's insights and moving conclusions.Kwame Dawes is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation. He currently holds the position of Distinguished Poet In Residence and Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina.

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Unique in crossing the cultural divides between the area's Anglophone and non-English speaking communities, Caribbean Poetics features authors from the Dominican Republic, Barbados and Haiti. The anthology has now been expanded to include new criticism of three of the Caribbean's most influential modern artists: Kamau Brathwaite, Pedro Mir and Rene Depestre."Discussions of Caribbean literary aesthetics have tended to focus on the writing of one of the main linguistic blocs of the region… Silvio Torres-Saillant's study is a welcome addition to work that considers commonalities across these blocs."John Thieme, World Literature TodaySilvio Torres-Saillant is the senior editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States (2005). He is also the author of An Intellectual History of the Caribbean (Macmillan, 2006). He teaches at Syracuse University, and lives in New York City.

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When his father dies in suspicious circumstances, Ferron Morgan's trauma is increased by the conflict within his family and his father's friends over whether the death is the result of medical negligence or a political assassination. Ferron has lived in awe of his father's radical commitments but is forced to admit that, with the 1980s' resurgence of the political Right in the Caribbean, his father had lost faith, and was 'already dead to everything that had meaning for him'.Ferron's response to the death is further complicated by guilt, particularly over his recent failure to protect his fiancée, Dolores, from a brutal rape. He begins, though, to investigate the direction of his life with great intensity, in particular to confront his instinct to keep running from trouble.This is a sharply-focused portrayal of Jamaica at a tipping point in its recent past, in which the private grief and trauma condenses a whole society's scarcely understood sense of temporariness and dislocation. For both Ferron and the society there has been the loss of 'the corpse of one's origins' and the novel points to the need to find a way back before there can be a movement forward.Kwame Dawes is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation. He currently holds the position of Distinguished Poet In Residence and Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina.

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An Absence of Ruins was originally published in 1967, a period of decolonising ferment in Jamaica. This important and much sought-after Caribbean classic is now lovingly restored to print, with an introduction by Jeremy Poynting.Patterson writes in the tradition of Dostoyevsky and Camus, creating a spiritual heir to the unnamed 'I' of Notes from the Underground or La Chute. Through the tangled love life of one Alexander Blackman, Patterson offers up a devastating critique of middle-class pretension, turning instead to the vibrant realities of the Jamaican working class. Full of sardonic humour and social commentary, the novel looks into the dark heart of social hierarchy, colonial education and the impact both have on the individual and the many."A very moving book about integrity preserved through an honest appraisal of its apparent loss."Robert Nye, The GuardianOrlando Patterson was born in Jamaica in 1940. He is the author of three novels: The Children of Sisyphus (1964, reprinted by Peepal Tree Press, 2011), An Absence of Ruins (1967), and Die the Long Day (1972). He received the National Book Award for Non-Fiction in 1991, and the Order of Distinction from the Government of Jamaica in 1999. He is now Professor of Sociology at Harvard University.

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There is a candour to Esther Phillips's affecting collection of poems, The Stone Gatherer, that can be quite disarming. In poems that undress the foibles of family – a father's masks and a mother's 'fortissimo' – there is tenderness and affection despite the pain. Here is a poet's voice that seeks and finds grace notes in the spaces between experience. Hers is a poetics that locates itself in the landscape of Barbados, displaying a facility for the Barbadian dialect and the lyrical West Indian English of the major poets that have come before her. The collection's structure is a woman-centred movement of poems that begins with the complex coming-of-age journey of a child, through an adulthood of romance and crushed emotions, through the rewards and anxieties of motherhood, to the contemplative and reflective place of maturity where a woman assumes the role of elder, protector of the community, and of prophet. Phillips embraces all of these roles in her poems, allowing us to enjoy what becomes an expansive narrative through time and life's changes. She shows herself to have the wit and intelligence of an artist committed to the use of verse to test the meaning of experience. And yet in all of this, we are often most struck by Phillips's eye for detail, her sense of landscape and her willingness to locate her poems in the world that moves and breathes around her.In The Stone Gatherer, one has the sense of an artist collecting stones of different shapes and dimensions, arranging them in such a way that there is space enough for them to breathe and for us to pause to think and feel.Esther Phillips was born and lives in Barbados.

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Anton Nimblett's stories are about characters driven by desire - for dignity and justice for a dead son, for privacy from a neighbour who collects lives, for sexual fulfilment as a gay man, for an old man's last assertion of love for a dying wife, for a man on the edge trying to block out the destructive voices of past pains. What is so impressive about the stories, beyond Anton Nimblett's sharp ear for a wide range of distinctive voices, and the ability to create vividly sensual pictures of place, and particularly of erotic encounters, is their facility in inhabiting contrary tendencies without strain. There is also an expert cinematographer's sense of when to cut and when to join, and several stories build to powerful dramatic tension through arresting montage. Within the collection there is both fluidity and sharp definition. Characters migrate between stories (just as they migrate between Trinidad and New York), being sometimes at the fringes, sometimes at the centre - Trinidadian lives seen both in motion and at rest. Writing with equal empathy about the lives of gay men, heterosexuals, young and old, country folk and urbanites, Anton Nimblett is a singularly attractive new voice in Caribbean writing.Anton Nimblett is a Trinidadian living and writing in Brooklyn.

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Crossing the space between novel & short fiction, 'A Permanent Freedom' weaves nine individual stories about love, sex, death & migration into a single compelling narrative that seizes our imagination with the profound courage, integrity & folly of which the human spirit is capable.

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This book is a celebration of who we are, good stuff, and not so good, our amazing senses, language, love, gossip, war and cheese. John Siddique's poems blast off the page into real life or they can melt as gently as a snowflake on you tongue. If you've not read a poetry book before then this is the one to start with, and if you have, here we go into a new land. Many of the poems in this book were conceived in primary schools, so John has added special bonus material to help you enjoy reading & writing more, and there is an exclusive interview about what it is to be a poet.

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Raymond Ramcharitar's sophisticated and formally ambitious poems have Trinidad as their centre but are global in scope. This is reflected both in their subject matter and their form. The regular movement between the Caribbean, Europe and North America that several of the poems chart is seen both as a contemporary reality, and as no more than a continuation of history's patterns: of, for instance, Indo-Trinidadians who are the 'scions of waylaid Brahmins and pariahs'. This particular migration is placed in the context of a wider world of human movement and 'new theologies springing from old longings'. In form, too, the poems refuse to be confined by any limiting sense of the contemporary and the Caribbean. Use of the archetypes of classical mythology, traditional verse patterns (such as the villanelle) and the careful, confident use of rhythm and rhyme are the most evident outward features of Ramcharitar's concern with form. There are homages to Derek Walcott and Wallace Stevens, but the closer one's acquaintance with the poems, the more evident that Ramcharitar's post-modern voice is a thoroughly individual one, with a capacity for writing verse narratives that are condensed but reverberate like the best short stories, dramatic monologues that skilfully create other voices, and lyric poems that get inside the less obvious byways of emotion.Raymond Ramcharitar was born in Trinidad. He worked as a journalist and is the author of a controversial and provocative study of the deficiencies of the Trinidadian press, Breaking the News: Media & Culture in Trinidad.

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David Chanderbali's book is a valuable addition to the small but growing literature concerning 19th century Indian indentured labour migration to plantation economies in the tropical world. It complements Hugh Tinker's (and others) studies of Indian indenture in the Caribbean, Surendra Bhana's (and others) of South Africa and those dealing with Fiji and Mauritius. Whilst Chanderbali's book is not the first to deal with Indian migration to the Malay peninsula, it is the first to deal comprehensively with the workings of the indenture system in that region. As such, it makes several important contributions. It offers a contribution to South-East Asian studies by giving a more accurate and detailed account of the circumstances of the arrival of Indians in what is now Malaysia. It adds to the history of labour movements in the nineteenth century by confirming what was common to the system wherever it manifested, and establishing what was local and distinctive. In this case, it involved features of the local Chinese rumah kechil system. One of these was to pay the immigrants' passage, in addition to making a cash advance. In return, the immigrants contracted to work for a specified length of time or until they liquidated their debts. This kind of debt bondage was not to be found in such a naked form in other versions of the indenture system. Chanderbali's narrative is lucidly written and well structured. Whilst amply documented with statistical tables, the study never loses sight of the people involved, whether Indian labourers or white planters. Above all, in its careful detail, it enables clear comparisons to be made in identifying the factors that shaped the commonalities and the distinctive features of particular indentured systems, features that have contributed to the contemporary position and inter-ethnic relationships of Indian communities in the Caribbean, South Africa, Mauritius and Fiji.

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'First Rain' is a spirit journey to pull together a 'necessary, fractured past', a poetic record of a struggle towards wholeness. In the first part, 'Bush Roots', Weir-Soley recovers her ancestral past in a series of narratives and dramatic monologues that give a living, breathing portrayal of a Jamaica that is gone, but whose parable-speaking elders still offer a guide to survival. Whether from actual memory, the fragments of family story, the clues from photographs or from a dreaming imagination, Weir-Soley presents a grandfather's 'dutty-tuff' vision, a grandmother's 'bush magic', the practical, gruff goodness of Uncle Miguel, the car mechanic who teaches generations of boys useful skills, who she sees as Ogun, a 'lesser god/for a greater good', and many others. These are people she makes you regret not having known, but grateful that she shares them. It is a world built up in careful detail, a complex, nuanced world that contains both neighbourly solidarity, but also the dividing gradations of class, skin-colour and occupation; a world where women can be treated as beasts of burden, where 'outside' children suffer emotional abuse, but where men like her uncle are shown behaving with great tenderness towards children. Against the solidity of this world, part two, 'Exiled Musings', contrasts the nightmarish, temporariness of Caribbean migrant life in the USA, a people 'orphaned from our homes'. Here, Weir-Soley brings the realities of the travails of young black men with the law, black on black violence, crack and HIV/Aids into sharp and often angry focus. But in the final parts, 'Heartwars' and 'Incantations', we see the struggles to rebuild family and respect, and the capacity for joy and sensuality, the resilience and spirituality of a people who never lose their sense of God's grace.

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When E.A. (Archie) Markham came to London in 1956 from his native Monserrat, his ambitions were to make it as a writer or pop singer, and at the same time, fulfil family expectations to become a scholar and academic. Unfortunately, the young Archie's attempts to combine elements of Little Richard and the now forgotten Jim Dale never found the success he was convinced they deserved, and it has been in less lucrative fields that Markham established his reputation as a 'nimble-footed, silver-tongued' poet, critic and fiction writer. His memoirs begin with a return to post-volcanic Montserrat to rediscover the now abandoned village of Harris and his grandmother's old house, and his meticulous and moving reconstruction of his boyhood in that house - a grand house that made the family feel that settling in the then working-class district of Maida Vale was a distinctly 'downwards' move for a cultivated Caribbean family. And, it is Markham's wryly humorous navigation between the poles of his family's confident sense of their worth and the racial bigotry they encountered that makes his account of his travails in the rag-trade, his pop-singer ambitions, the discovery that they were living next door to a leading member of the British Union of Fascists, and his involvement with the 'angry-young-men' shifts in 1950's British culture such a rewarding and human document.

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Set in the early nineteenth century The Counting House follows the lives of Rohini and Vidia, a young married couple struggling for survival in a small, caste-ridden Indian village who are seduced by the recruiter's talk of easy work and plentiful land if they sign up as indentured labourers to go to British Guiana. There, however, they discover a harsh fate as 'bound coolies' in a country barely emerging from the savage brutalities of slavery. Having abandoned their families and a country that seems increasingly like a paradise, they must come to terms with their problematic encounters with an Afro-Guyanese population hostile to immigrant labour, with rebels such as Kampta who has made an early abandonment of Indian village culture, and confront the truths of their uprooted condition."Excellent... Presented with poetic precision, this novel succeeds as both a compelling story and a beautifully sustained piece of writing." Sean Coughlan, The Times."Beautifully written... Dabydeen's grace, as a poet turned novelist, is to give his characters' imaginations and inner lives voices in prose... This is a marvelous novel" Michele Roberts, Independent on Sunday.David Dabydeen was born in Guyana. He has published six acclaimed novels and three collections of poetry. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.

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At the core of this collection are poems that chart the attempt to come to terms with the life shattering loss of two relationships: father and husband. They explore, with a great exactness, the connections between inner feelings and the physical context for those feelings: the Jamaican landscape, and the promptings of external phenomena to memory. They 'sip the brine of loss: proof that I have lived'. Though in one sense Gwyneth Barber Wood writes against the grain of much recent Jamaican poetry by writing almost exclusively in standard English (the one occasion when she uses nation language is all the more powerful by contrast) and using traditional forms of verse, her poems are intensely Jamaican. Those poems that are set in England are almost wholly defined by Jamaican absences. A London silence becomes all the more empty as the memory of 'someone's bashment in the valley welled/ up in my head.' Elsewhere there is a careful attention to the quality of Jamaican light that subtly maps shifts of mood, as when the shadow of the dying day 'creases the backs of hills', where what has once been solid becomes fragile and subject to change. Gwyneth Barber Wood is a quiet, but distinctive new voice in Jamaican and Caribbean poetry. She has a gift for vividly detailed yet compressed narratives (of, for instance, her childhood recall of the breaking up of her parent's marriage) that say as much as short stories twenty times the length, of telling detail (hearing a friend's grief, for example, in the 'quiet crackle of a phone') and striking metaphor (forgiveness 'spawns like a salmon in brackish grey').

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From Imfe who is taken into slavery from Africa, Zero and Quamina who live under slavery but never submit to being slaves, Bam and Jane who live to see Emancipation but discover that they have been given little but the freedom to starve, Tom and Louise who endure the injustices of the colonial years, to Rocky who takes part in the popular uprisings for freedom and democracy in the 1930s, Nor the Battle to the Strong is an unrivalled portrayal of the lives of five generations of a family in Barbados.Nor the Battle to the Strong is a powerful and imaginative work of grief and hope whose universality is pointed to in the title's reference to Ecclesiastes: 'The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, for time and chance happeneth to them all.' It takes the reader through horrors as elemental as those of the Greek tragedy, through the dark humour of those who endured generations of human injustice, and all that flood, drought, hurricane and disease could inflict, to arrive at a hard-won but liberating vision of the human capacity for freedom, love and forgiveness. Jackson sings a redemption song which transports the reader out of darkness into light.Carl Jackson was born in Barbados where he lives and works. He is also the author of East Wind in Paradise, a political thriller.

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A talking frog, a haughty green cat, an animal fashion show: these are some of the characters and scenes which will delight the many children who enjoyed When Grandpa Cheddi was a Boy.Set mainly in Guyana, these stories of brave, ingenious, kindly and sometimes mischievous animals and children use humour and mystery to provide a strong framework of positive human values which children will instinctively appreciate and digest.Janet Jagan has served Guyana for over fifty years as a politician and as editor of the Mirror newspaper. She was the first woman President of Guyana.

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'She felt like a bird in a cage with the door open. Was she going to fly out?' Alice, like the other women in Meiling Jin's stories, is at a point of change: Li li is pregnant, alone and frightened at the 'School for Perfect Secretaries'; Gladys plots revenge against her racist neighbour; Margret, taking a trip back home to Malaysia, doesn't know if she can tell her mother that she is a lesbian; Hazel is not sure if her future lies with Sandra and 'a loving which scared her'. Whether her scene is London, China, California, Malaysia or the Caribbean, whether writing with unwavering and painful realism, wicked humour or lyrical imagination, Meiling Jin takes us inside the lives and experiences of her characters in ways which cannot but involve the reader. Each has a journey to make, each their song to sing. Female or male, lesbian or straight, black or white, all are in some part boatwomen.Meiling Jin was born in Guyana in 1963, she now lives in London. She is the author of Gifts from My Grandmother, a collection of poetry published by Sheba, and stories for children. She is also a playwright and film maker.

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'Things been bright last night,' Nice Gyal said to Reenee.'Like you pick up something good?''Something good?' She skinned her eyes. 'Is seven trawler men I knock down'.'Gracious.''Gracious,' Nice Gyal repeated. 'I had to piss in their vodka to make them lose their sense.''I hook up five Buck-man from the gold bush,' Sugar Plum joined in.'You had to piss in their vodka too?' Reenee asked.'No, I gave them Guinness with condensed milk and a raw egg in between.'Ignoring their laughter, a quiet man sits brooding in a corner of the Belmonte Hotel, nursing his high wine. Intrigued, Reenee is determined to uncover his secret...Beauty and squalor, sexual corruption and redemptive love coexist in tense equilibrium in this novel of injustice, revenge and expiation. In exploring how a cycle of hatred can be broken, Bissundyal takes the reader into the spectacular dereliction of the slums of Georgetown, the lively pleasures of village life on the island of Leguan on the Essequibo and into the peaceful intensity of the remote interior, writing with a poet's eye which startles and beguiles."An original and exciting new voice in Caribbean writing..." David DabydeenChuraumanie Bissundyal was born in Guyana in 1950. He is heavily involved in theatre and is the author of several plays.

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The pundit warns Sastra's mother that her daughter's birth signs foretell two possible karmas, one of prosperous security if she keeps to the well-tried path of obedience to tradition, the other of mixed joy and misery if she should attempt to 'fly' and follow her own desires. These are indeed Sastra's choices - between the traditional, collective Hindu society of her parents, and the world of individual destinies and responsibilities to which her generation is increasingly drawn.Set in Trinidad in the 1950s, Sastra is a moving and tender love story, a rich evocation of the village world and a memorable portrayal of a brave young woman who never tries to evade or complain about the consequences of her choice."One of the novel's most striking qualities is the assurance with which it registers inner turbulence. It often suggests a web of feeling that trembles within a framework of courtesies."Mervyn MorrisLakshmi Persaud was born in 1939 in Trinidad. She is the author of Butterfly in the Wind, Sastra and For the Love of My Name. She lives in London.

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In the fields of whispering sugar cane, the rugged Atlantic coast of crashing breakers and the womb-like gullies of Barbados, the characters in these stories find a landscape which mirrors their inner lives. Set at crucial points in Caribbean history, from slavery to the present; from Nanny, who cannot bear another day's captivity when rumours of slavery's abolition reach the island, to Hilda, returning home after many years in Britain, these are strong and moving portrayals of women attempting to define themselves in situations where power is determined by race and gender.Nanny knows that "neither she nor others could really call their lives their own", but it is not only under slavery that June Henfrey's women confront this fact. In doing so, their lives enlarge our sense of history."In her memorable story, 'The Gully', Quashebah, a slave who is raped and made pregnant by her overseer, flees and seeks sustenance for her secret dreams of freedom in a limestone cave, where she finds both welcome and protection. A particularly deep-rooted story is 'Freedom Come', telling of Nanny, one of the enthusiasts and mobilisers of Bussa's slave rebellion in Barbados in 1816. Henfrey's portrait, convincing and assured, is of an 'old African who had never yielded to the fact of her enslavement. All her characters are of this mettle, whether born of slavery, colonialism or migration, and June Henfrey's stories have left us the words and spirit of a writer and woman whose life and creative impulse was ever to seek freedom and betterment for her people on two sides of an ocean."Chris SearleJune Henfrey was born and grew up in Barbados. She later worked in community education in Liverpool. She wrote the stories in Coming Home during the two years before she died in 1992.

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In language which is deceptively simple and accessible, Satyendra Srivastava writes about a world which is, on the surface, familiar. In the wry wit of his reinterpretations of Hindu myth and the sometimes surreal nature of his story-telling, he constantly surprises us into looking at the world afresh. He creates characters, such as Sita of Chapel Street and Bob Shillington, who plays cricket alone, who are emblematic and memorable. His voice is irreverent, bawdy, pained and gentle by turns, but always distinctive and intimate."There was a time, aside from all the Imperial cant and abuses, when Indian and Briton could share a unique intimacy of culture. A forced intimacy to start with and one never lacking in passion on both sides, but one that creatively brought out the best in the best of both races. Then came a messy painful divorce, with hurt pride and a rather hollow proving to the world that each could do without the other... but like two old lovers they still keep sneaking back into each others arms. Such meetings are often fruitful and something like Satyendra Srivastava's Talking Sanskrit to Fallen Leaves, full of life and hybrid vigour, comes to birth."Haiku QuarterlySatyendra Srivastava was born in India, but has lived for over thirty years in the U.K. He currently teaches at Cambridge University.

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When Columbus arrived in the Caribbean in 1492, he believed that he had landed on the coast of India. Cyril Dabydeen's ancestors came from India to the Caribbean in the nineteenth century as indentured labourers. This is an irony which appeals to him, an 'illustration of an odd and idiosyncratic destiny at work'. Since then, like many of his fellow Guyanese, Cyril Dabydeen has moved on again to settle in Canada. This collection of poems grows out of a consciousness of a world made up of layers of journeyings and settlement, of the meeting of heterogeneous cultures and the results of their mingling. On 'a deserted but peopled land', Dabydeen explores experiences of Canada and the Caribbean which simultaneously speak of a past of brutal genocide and tyranny and a world of recreating newness, constantly awaiting rediscovery, constantly evolving from the convergencies which that voyage of 1492 began.Cyril Dabydeen was born in Guyana in 1945. He migrated to Canada in 1970. He is the author of almost a dozen collections of poetry, two novels and six collections of short stories.

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A shame tree is a Jamaican symbol for the development of moral consciousness, and the poems in this collection explore the points at which moral values emerge - and the consequences of their absence. The poems suggest toughly that such consciousness does not grow without unremitting effort and scrupulous sensitivity to feeling, but there is nothing didactic or moralistic about them. They are imaginative recreations of the dramas of coming to consciousness and the inevitable ambiguities of truth. As in all Velma Pollard's work, there is a deeply imbued sense of Caribbean history."Tone and emotion range wider in Velma Pollard's Shame Trees Don't Grow Here... but poincianas bloom - from disgust, anger, and outrage to celebration, awe, and praise; from questioning and condemnation to understanding and reconciliation. The major thrust of the poet's fire comes in the first part of the book where those who lacked or are lacking conscience and moral boundaries are drawn into Pollard's unflinching scrutiny. Wildfire becomes hearth in part two where the beauty and life-enhancing qualities of land, sea, and people are celebrated. Throughout, the poet's skillful use of language remains evident in, for example, her subtle, unobtrusive rhymes that lend musicality to her verse; her puns; double entendres; and other word play."Marvin Williams, The Caribbean WriterVelma Pollard writes poetry, fiction and studies of language. She was born in Jamaica and works at the University of the West Indies where she is Dean of the Faculty of Education.

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Palmist Village in Trinidad has a rich mixture of Hindus, Muslims and Christians living side by side, happy to let each other be. But when Pastor Goberdan, local representative of an American fundamentalist church, comes to convert the 'heathen', things fall apart. A bitter struggle for the soul of Palmist begins as the new converts project their guilts and paranoias onto those who resist. For the Elect, the works of Satan are everywhere, and indeed, as the old 'heathen' restraints are cast aside, and as Goberdan's prurient obsession with the flesh taints his flock, an orgy of sexual jealousy, greed and revenge erupts in the village.The Elect is is a timely and abrasive satire on the new imperialism of the fundamentalist Christian sects of North America which have swept through the Caribbean, claiming an exclusive possession of the truth, demanding absolute obedience from their followers and threatening the cultural independence of the region.Sharlow(e) Mohammed was born in the village of Longdenville in the agricultural area of central Trinidad in 1949.

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When Raj, a reluctant schoolteacher with a weakness for schoolgirls, Hindu activist and would-be published novelist, protests against a breach of tradition at his temple, he is confronted by a trail of corrupted power which leads to the heart of the post-colonial Guyanese state. By turns acutely perceptive and self-deceiving, a quirky individualist and a stickler for convention, self-aggrandising and self-mocking, Raj is a dangling man, desperate to create something of value in a shabby and corrupt despotism. Forced to look inwards, he discovers that the truth-telling must begin with himself.Persaud portrays the Indo-Guyanese community in the early 1980s as a community under intense stress. When sections of the leadership of Hindu organisations have come to an uneasy accommodation with the authoritarian corruption of Fox Burton's African-dominated ruling party, the breach of convention of taking chairs into their temple takes on a huge symbolic significance for the temple's young activists. For them, promoting Hinduism amongst an increasingly secularised Indo-Guyanese community has become an act of ethnic survival."Poetic in tone, surrealistic in thrust... a good addition to Caribbean literature." The Caribbean WriterSasenarine Persaud was born in Guyana. He has published two novels, a collection of stories and four collections of poetry. He currently lives and works in the USA.

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When a European naturalist arrives in a remote South American village, how are the villagers to respond to his promise to remove the monstrous massacouraman from the creek? Is he a saviour freeing them from its danger, or is he threatening to take away something which is uniquely theirs for display in an American or European zoo? Folk belief confronts rationalistic science in this poetic fable which sees events through both European and village eyes.Set in the remote Canje region, the villagers in Dark Swirl feel that they have only the most vestigial remnants of their original Hindu world view. They have, indeed, absorbed much of the local mix of Amerindian/African folk beliefs - in the existence of the legendary massacouraman, for instance. What they still have, though, is a residual Hindu view of the interconnectedness of all living things, though in their state of rootlessness this sometimes expresses itself in feelings of mutual hostility and unwarranted cruelty.Dreams are the interconnecting territory between the myth of the massacouraman and the innermost fantasies and intuitions of the villagers that relate to their fears concerning their loss of authenticity and their unbelonging. And it is in a dreamlike state induced by sickness, where he can no longer disentangle what is real from what is in his imagination, that the 'divided selves' of the European stranger begin speaking to him as: 'twin messengers with contrary tales'. In the process his whole structure of thought is profoundly altered."Massacouraman is a formidable Guyanese folk legend... Dark Swirl seeks to plumb its pertinence to all factions, groups, races, insiders, outsiders. The novel seeks to evoke an inner region lying somewhere between the science of the stranger and the fantasies and visions of the village folk. Before they part company they appear to see through interchangeable eyes into the mysteries of a nature in a long state of eclipse..."Wilson HarrisCyril Dabydeen was born in Guyana in 1945. He migrated to Canada in 1970. He is the author of almost a dozen collections of poetry, two novels and six collections of short stories.

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When Devan, the awkward boy from Providence Village, finds his vocation as a teacher of Hinduism to the rural Indians of the Corentyne Coast of Guyana, his life and his troubles begin. In this richly comic novel, Cyril Dabydeen creates a vibrant picture of the Guyanese Hindu community struggling for a place in what is for Devan a confusingly multi-racial country. When Devan leaves his village and his wife and children behind, he finds urban, cosmopolitan Georgetown, with its wealthy and politically cynical Indian elite, an experience frequently at odds with the ardent simplicities of his teaching. In the tragi-comic absurdities of Devan's career, Dabydeen reveals powerfully the dangers to a religion's truths when it is made to serve the needs of ethnic assertion. But in becoming the Wizard Swami in charge of Mr Bhairam's prize racehorse Destiny, Devan not only reaches his lowest point, but also begins to discover truths of a much more tentative but enlightening kind. The Wizard Swami is a finely observed comedy of manners, but it is much more than that in its imaginative and poetic play with the symbols of Hinduism in a secular and cosmopolitan society.Cyril Dabydeen was born in Guyana in 1945. He migrated to Canada in 1970. He is the author of almost a dozen collections of poetry, two novels and six collections of short stories.

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Leitão's novel brings alive the vanished world of colonial Goa, a hybrid creation of Portuguese Catholicism and the Hindu caste system. From its beginnings in village rivalries, fought out by the bulls of neighbouring Cavelossim and Carmona, the sleeping dragon of Goan nationalism awakes. But when the Goan people rise up against their Portuguese masters, their victory is hollow. The fruits of their struggle are plucked by the new commercial elite and their distinctive culture is swamped as Goa is annexed by India. Focusing on the tragic figure of Mario Jaques, a village leader who wants to preserve the best of the old world in the new, but who is isolated by his own confusions and swept away by social forces beyond his control, Leitão writes passionately of a popular movement betrayed. Whilst the old world is marked by feudal oppression and superstitious ignorance, Leitão vividly, and often humorously, recreates the communal exuberance of Goan village life: feiras exploding with firecrackers, the dancing harmonies of the violin bandes, the aromas of roasting gram and sorpatel, the spectacles of the theatre and the processions of the saints. In the new world there is only a ruthless competitiveness in which the worst rise to the top.Lino Leitão was born in Goa, resident in Uganda for some years and now lives in Canada. He is the author of three collections of short stories.

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The stories in this collection give an unrivalled picture of the lives of the Indo-Guyanese workers on the sugar estates in the period between the 1930s and the early 1950s when the estate communities broke up. They explore with great insight the ambivalence between accommodation and resistance that characterized estate life. They portray a people subject to the most oppressive forms of labour and managerial authority, sometimes held back by their inner conflicts and superstitions, but invariably engaged in some form of resistance, whether overt, or more frequently scampish schemes for avoiding hard labour or taking some advantage of the estate authorities. Above all, the backdam people resist by refusing to surrender their sense of community and cultural identity.The stories are unblinking in their portrayal of the violence and bawdy of the estate dwellers' lives, celebrating those like Massala Maraj who outwit big Manager but also mourning those who are broken by the punishing years of canefield work. The stories are by turns comic and tragic in their tone, but always in the end sympathetic to the vigorous individuality of people who struggle to live their lives 'according to their own likeness'. This is a landmark collection in its total commitment to the Hindi-influenced Creole of the sugar workers - though a glossary provides help with unfamiliar terms. Above all, these are the backdam people's own stories, told in their own creole tongue and shaped by Monar's skills as a storyteller."The success of Monar's comic treatment is that it enables him to present scenes of gross violence and brutality without sentimentality. We laugh... but do not ignore the cruelty, pain and suffering involved..."Frank BirbalsinghRooplall Monar was born on the Lusignan sugar estate in Guyana in 1945. Apart from brief overseas visits he has lived in Guyana all his life, in Annandale village, East Coast Demerara.

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When Mahadai Das died at the tragically early age of 49, there was an outpouring of grief across the Caribbean that a poet, who never quite had the chance to build a literary career to match her talents, had been lost. She had been known for some time as a highly promising Guyanese poet, but when Peepal Tree published her Bones in 1988, there was widespread critical recognition that here was an outstandingly original new voice. Then severe illness struck and though there followed occasional poems that developed the achievement of Bones, there was no new collection.This Collected Poems, discussed with Mahadai Das before her death, and organised in co-operation with the poet's sister, brings together almost all the poems she wrote. It includes I Want to Be a Poetess of My People (1976), My Finer Steel Will Grow (1982), and Bones (1988). In addition, A Leaf in His Ear brings together many of the fine poems published in journals and previously uncollected, and some unpublished work, from lively, humorous nation-language poems to experiments with ballad forms and the oblique, gnomic poems written in the years after Bones.With an introduction by Denise DeCaires Narain Gurnah.Mahadai Das was born in Guyana in 1954. She was a dancer, actress, teacher, beauty-queen and volunteer member of the Guyana National Service. She left Guyana to philosophy in the USA. Then came debilitating health problems. She died in 2003.

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Anthony McNeill was without doubt amongst the finest contemporary Caribbean poets, whose previous collections were hailed as works of immense originality. Chinese Lanterns from the Blue Child won the 1995 Jamaican National Literary Award. Completed shortly before his death, it is a farewell to the world which moves like a bird in flight between moments of painful regret, wry humour and a sense of closure. Anthony McNeill's word-lanterns will continue to flame in the darkness long beyond his death.Anthony McNeill was born in Jamaica in 1941 and died in 1996. His previous collections include Reel from 'The Life Movie' (1972) and Credences at the Altar of Cloud (1979).

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The fourth and final instalment in the poetic conversation, begun in 2014, between poets and friends Kwame Dawes and John Kinsella.

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Difficult Fruit grapples with personal experience - with naming and claiming the 'fruits' of a specific journey into womanhood. This journey is one which includes coming to terms with violence and loss, celebrating love and connection, and standing witness in the world that shaped that journey. It is a collection of poems about coming into self-knowledge - of fighting for and winning personhood as a woman in the world. The central poem, 'Eighteen', chronicles the aftermath of sexual assault. In it the speaker is reborn from the shadow of the experience as a 'miracle scream' and a 'dark voice', and vows to 'learn the language that will allow [her] to summon [her] own angels'. By the poem 'Thirty', the speaker understands 'maybe older and wiser is just learning/ how to put yourself in your own good hands'. The poems of age scattered throughout the manuscript both chronicle and disrupt time - they look back into the speaker's past as a way to understand the present, as well as to find something that the speaker needs in order to move forward. The many elegies in the collection consider the ultimate price of life, which is death, and as the poem 'How It Touches Us' comes to realise, 'all laws of matter must hold true'. The poems are a movement through fracture - both necessary and unwarranted - toward wholeness and transformation.

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Kendel Hippolyte is a poet, a playwright, and a director. He is the author of five books of poetry, including "Birthright" and "Fault Lines," and his writing has been featured in various journals, such as the "Greenfield Review" and the "Massachusetts Review," as well as in the anthologies "Caribbean Poetry Now" and "Voiceprint." He has twice won the Minvielle & Chastanet Fine Arts Award for Literature and was awarded the St. Lucia Medal of Merit in 2000.""

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Gerald Manston and his friends Shifty and Fu lead pretty uneventful lives until the arrival of the "upheaval." When the opportunity arrives for a better way of life, the poor folks of Kingston, Jamaica--including Gerald--cannot resist the lure of excitement, danger, and change. This touching story not only discusses political issues, but also promotes family values.

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