Friday 16th December would have been Guyanese writer Edgar Mittelholzer’s 113rd birthday. To celebrate, Chapter & Verse published an homage to the seminal writer on their YouTube channel.
We invite you to submit previously unpublished poetry or prose which creatively responds to David Oluwale’s story and its relevance today. You can find out about his story here.
Your submission can respond to David’s life or death or take it as a starting point to explore any issues that his story touches upon, such as the city of Leeds, marginalisation, racial justice, mental ill-health, rough-sleeping, exclusion, resistance and hope, reinterpreted as you see fit.
Photo by Unsplash
As Penguin Random House's proposed merger with Simon & Schuster was scuppered in the US recently, it's perhaps timely to revisit one of the more interesting details of the case.
Independent bookshop Paper Based shares its top-selling Caribbean titles with the Trinidad Express, covering the past month. For September that list includes two Peepal Tree Press books:
1. The Bread the Devil Knead, by Lisa Allen-Agostini
2. Pleasantview, by Celeste Mohammed
3. The Dreaming, by Andre Bagoo
4. Love the Dark Days, by Ira Mathur
5. The Mark of Cane, by Ken Jaikaransingh
As partners in the SI Leeds Literary Prize, we are delighted to announce the six shortlisted books for the 2022 prize as follows:
George Lamming was a giant of Caribbean letters and one who invited white Britain to think hard about its relationship to the Caribbean in ways we have hardly begun. In In the Castle of My Skin (1953) he wrote the classic novel of growing up under the Union Jack in the 1930s and the discovery of racial pride in the Black struggles for radical change in both the USA and in Barbados, whose impetus would carry forward the demands for national independence, which are still being expressed in his native Barbados in its rejection of colonial monarchy for republican status.
In its editorial 'The Guardian view on Trinidad writers: women take the lead', The Guardian writes about the increasing number of success stories from Trinidad's women writers. This amounts to a 'show of strength for a small island', they write.
Monique Roffey has written in The Guardian about the 'lit-boom' for Trinidadian women writers.
