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Kevin Baldeosingh (born 1963) [1] is a Trinidadian newspaper columnist, author and Humanist, who has been involved in many controversial social issues, especially in respect to religious issues. He has worked with the Trinidad Express, Newsday and the Trinidad Guardian. In July 2017, after 25 years in the field, he ceased working as a journalist when his contract was not renewed by the Trinidad Guardian and he was not hired by any other media company.
In twenty years as a professional writer he has written more than 2,000 newspaper articles, over 30 periodical articles and papers, 20-plus short stories, and three novels. In 2007, his one-act play, The Comedian, was one of the four winning plays in the National Drama Association playwriting contest. He was also one of 15 prize-winning finalists in a 2007 international essay competition, organized by US-based "TRACE International" (a non-profit organization that develops and promotes anti-bribery programs), on official corruption and how to prevent it. [2]
Kevin has also co-authored a Caribbean history text for secondary school students, written books on media practice, parenting, as well as a collection of policy essays. He has also written the only modern history of Trinidad, which gives a social and economic picture of the island from 1901 to 2001. His articles have been published in the US and UK on Areo, FEE, Spiked, CapX, Mises Wire, and The Washington Examiner.
He was a co-founder and chairman of the Trinidad and Tobago Humanist Association, the only organization of its kind in the Anglophone Caribbean. He was also vice-chair for ASPIRE (Advocates for Safe Parenthood: Improving Reproductive Equity), a lobby group seeking clarification and updating of Trinidad and Tobago's laws on abortion, with the aim of reducing the health risks and maternal mortality associated with unsafe illegal abortions. He was regional chairperson for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Canada/Caribbean) for 2000 and 2001. [3]
Earl Wilbert Lovelace is a Trinidadian novelist, journalist, playwright, and short story writer. He is particularly recognized for his descriptive, dramatic fiction on Trinidadian culture: "Using Trinidadian dialect patterns and standard English, he probes the paradoxes often inherent in social change as well as the clash between rural and urban cultures." As Bernardine Evaristo notes, "Lovelace is unusual among celebrated Caribbean writers in that he has always lived in Trinidad. Most writers leave to find support for their literary endeavours elsewhere and this, arguably, shapes the literature, especially after long periods of exile. But Lovelace's fiction is deeply embedded in Trinidadian society and is written from the perspective of one whose ties to his homeland have never been broken."
Ian McDonald is a Caribbean-born poet and writer who describes himself as "Antiguan by ancestry, Trinidadian by birth, Guyanese by adoption, and West Indian by conviction." His ancestry on his father's side is Antiguan and Kittitian, and Trinidadian on his mother’s side. His only novel, The Humming-Bird Tree, first published in 1969, is considered a classic of Caribbean literature.
Vahni Anthony Ezekiel Capildeo is a Trinidadian Scottish writer, and a member of the extended Capildeo family that has produced notable Trinidadian politicians and writers.
Lawrence Scott FRSL is a novelist and short-story writer from Trinidad and Tobago, who divides his time between London and Port of Spain. He has also worked as a teacher of English and Drama at schools in London and in Trinidad. Scott's novels have been awarded (1998) and short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and thrice nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award. His stories have been much anthologised and he won the Tom-Gallon Short-Story Award in 1986.
Anthony Joseph is a British/Trinidadian poet, novelist, musician and academic.
Kei Miller is a Jamaican poet, fiction writer, essayist and blogger. He is also a professor of creative writing.
Wayne Vincent Brown was a columnist, poet and fiction writer, and a teacher and mentor to numerous Caribbean writers.
Raymond R. Ramcharitar is a Trinidadian poet, playwright, fiction writer, historian and media and cultural critic.
OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, inaugurated in 2011 by the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, is an annual literary award for books by Caribbean writers published in the previous year. It is the only prize in the region that is open to works of different literary genres by writers of Caribbean birth or citizenship.
Funso Aiyejina is a Nigerian poet, short story writer, playwright and academic. He is the former Dean of Humanities and Education and current Professor Emeritus at the University of the West Indies. His collection of short fiction, The Legend of the Rockhills and Other Stories, won the 2000 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best First Book (Africa).
Monique Roffey is a Trinidadian-born British writer and memoirist. Her novels have been much acclaimed, winning awards including the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, for Archipelago, and the Costa Book of the Year award, for The Mermaid of Black Conch in 2021.
The NGC Bocas Lit Fest is the Trinidad and Tobago literary festival that takes place annually during the last weekend of April in Port of Spain. Inaugurated in 2011, it is the first major literary festival in the southern Caribbean and largest literary festival in the Anglophone Caribbean. A registered non-profit company, the festival has as its title sponsor the National Gas Company of Trinidad and Tobago (NGC). Other sponsors and partners include First Citizens Bank, One Caribbean Media (OCM), who sponsor the associated OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, CODE, and the Commonwealth Foundation.
Roger Robinson is a British writer, musician and performer who lives between England and Trinidad. His book A Portable Paradise won the prestigious T. S. Eliot Prize 2019, announced in London in January 2020. He is the second writer of Caribbean heritage to win the prize, the highest value award in UK poetry, after Derek Walcott who won the 2010 prize. Robinson's victory was also seen as an important one for small presses. A Portable Paradise was only the second book of poetry to win the Ondaatje Prize in May 2020.
James Christopher Aboud is a Trinidad and Tobago High Court judge and poet.
Selwyn Cudjoe is a Trinidad and Tobago academic, scholar, historian, essayist and editor who is Professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. He was also the Margaret E. Deffenbaugh and LeRoy T. Carlson Professor in Comparative Literature and the Marion Butler McClean Professor in the History of Ideas at Wellesley. His particular expertise is Caribbean literature and Caribbean intellectual history, and he teaches courses on the African-American literary tradition, African literature, black women writers, and Caribbean literature.
Marina Ama Omowale Maxwell, also known as Marina Maxwell and Marina Maxwell Omowale, is a Trinidadian playwright, performer, poet and novelist. She was associated with the Caribbean Artists Movement in London in the late 1960s, working with Edward Kamau Brathwaite, while back in the Caribbean she was responsible for developing the experimental Yard Theatre, which was "an attempt to place West Indian theatre in the life of the people [...] to find it in the yards where people live and are." The concept "yard theatre" was considered revolutionary by Brathwaite because it not only rejected the traditions of colonial Euro-American theatre but provided a viable creative local alternative.
Barbara Jenkins is a Trinidadian writer, whose work since 2010 has won several international prizes, including the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the Wasafiri New Writing Prize.
Nicholas Laughlin is a writer and editor from Trinidad and Tobago. He has been editor of The Caribbean Review of Books since 2004, and also edits the arts and travel magazine Caribbean Beat. He is the festival and programme director of the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, having worked alongside founder and managing director Marina Salandy-Brown since 2011.
Lisa Allen-Agostini is a Trinidadian journalist, editor and writer of fiction, poetry and drama. She is also a stand-up comedian, performing as "Just Lisa".
Kevin Jared Hosein is a Caribbean novelist who is from Trinidad and Tobago. He is most well-known for winning the 2018 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, the most global literary prize in the world, with his work, Passage. He also won the regional (Caribbean) section of the Prize in 2015, with The King of Settlement 4. His upcoming novel, Devotion, is slated for publication as a major lead title in 2022 by Bloomsbury Publishing and Ecco Press.
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