The  jury for the Guyana Prize for Literature 2010 met in Guyana at the end of July and  decided on the shortlist of finalists in the various categories of awards, according to the management committee of the prize.

Awards in the prize will  be presented at an Awards Presentation ceremony on September 1, 2011 in the Savannah Suite of the Pegasus Hotel, starting at 7.00 pm.  

CATEGORIES  AND AWARDS

The Guyana Prize for Literature is open to Guyanese authors, for works in five  categories:  Poetry, Fiction, Drama, First Book of Fiction and First Book of Poetry.  These  will be awarded prizes of  US$5,000 for the Best Book in each category and  US$3,000 for each of the Best First Books.

GUYANA PRIZE  2011 SHORTLISTS

The shortlisted works are listed below in alphabetical order:

Best Book of Poetry

Brian Chan’s The Gift of Screws has a speaker who is ruminating in middle-age on a range of epiphanies of a lifetime. Whether observing a caged lioness or paying tribute to his spouse who has been "elbower and hand-holder; compass and / carriage,” he considers the various ways we recall and reconfigure the past in poetic fictions, and how these remembrances are driven by the hope that “the sheer everydayness of our miracles / outweighs the nonesuch of the ordinary.”

Stanley Greaves’s The Poems Man is a homage to Martin Carter -- the “poems man” of the title.  Attentive to the forms and thoughts of poetry, Greaves shift surreally between the imaginary landscapes of his own paintings and philosophical questions that engaged Carter's poetry.  Fascinated by the interplay of the visual imagination and the “intoxication of speech,” he probes the act of creation with a terseness and rhythmic economy close to the poetic voice of the mature Carter.

Maggie Harris’s After a Visit to a Botanical Garden has a speaker whose encompassing frame of references is Guyana and UK, Michael Jackson and Lata Mangeskar, botanical gardens and train stations, and who is witty and lyrical, playful and tender.  One poem drolly examines technological progress; another captures the various voices of vendors at a West Indian tourist market as they entice shoppers;  in yet another she has a speaker contemplating her maternal emotions at her daughter’s wedding.

Mark McWatt’s The Journey to Le Repentir retraces the growth of a curious child in the remote northwest of Guyana, paralleling the speaker’s transition to adulthood with the journey of an Elizabethan sea-captain searching for El Dorado centuries earlier.  The latter parts of the collection address adolescent passions and the challenges of mid-life and old age, juxtaposing personal and political creation/destruction and the remorse of a Frenchman whose accidental fratricide drove him to rename his estates La Penitence and Le Repentir.

Sasenarine Persaud’s In A Boston Night  takes us on a disturbing tour of Boston and the east coast of the US and Canada,  mentioning incidents past  (”Boston Tea Party”) and present (“Audience: Walcott in Boston”).  A dominant aspect of these poems that feature marginalized immigrants as their speakers is their sense that they are outsiders: one sees himself as a “stranger,” who “could never meet again” with those he has met en passant. Another, a poet, who is told that his “language is weird,” asks “how to write a bastard self.”

Berkley W. Semple’s The Central Station plays on the word “station” (class, status, destination, death, home-base) and the poems (all hundred-plus that have one-word titles) look at all these meanings in mostly Guyanese contexts from various perspectives.  One which views the death of many generations of fishermen as missing links in the family-tree ends with “the lack fills a whole life with trying to fill.”  Of the historical killings in “Lusignan,” the speaker is paralyzed by “horrors heavier than this poem can hold.”

Best Book of Fiction

David Dabydeen’s Molly and the Muslim Stick is a novel that shifts between realism and absurdism.  The eponymous English heroine is raised in grim Lancashire of the 1930s. Subjected to horrific sexual abuse by her father and his friends and psychologically damaged and teetering on madness, she finds solace in a talking Muslim walking-stick and in Om, an illegal Amerindian from British Guiana, whom she follows back to the Demerara jungle, where she learns to reject her victimhood and looks to the future with hope.

Karen King-Aribisala’s The Hangman’s Game is a novel that has an Afro-Guyanese female protagonist who attempts to write a historical novel about the 1823 Demerara Slave Revolt.  Struggling with writer’s block, she travels to Nigeria, in the 1990s, in search of an explanation for the slave trade but does not return to her writing until a family friend is murdered by El Presidente’s military regime. The historical and the contemporary blur as Nigerian tyrants around her begin to mirror the brutal behaviour of the nineteenth-century slaver-owners.

Janice Lowe Shinebourne’s Chinese Women is a novel about a financially successful Canadian-Guyanese immigrant’s life-long obsession with a Guyanese-Chinese woman.   The protagonist remembers his life as a young Muslim suffering the crushing segregation of estate life in colonial Guyana, where he becomes obsessed with the young Chinese girl. His thwarted devotion to her leads him years after to seek her out in contemporary post-9/11 London at a time when he seemingly is engaged in Middle Eastern subversive activities.

Best Drama

Harold Bascom’s Blank Document is a radio drama that explores interwoven themes of lesbianism, Guyanese migration, family relationship, and creative writing. The protagonist, a past winner of the Guyana Prize, has a badly kept personal secret, which, when exposed, forces her to migrate to the US, where, ostracized and depressed, her life becomes “a blank document,” a state from which she eventually recovers after a cathartic experience.

Janice Imhoff ‘s The Changing Hand portrays the lives  of Georgetown’s street people, underlining  their resilience to cope with and survive  whatever fate throws at them.  The protagonist is an eccentric old woman, who belongs to the tradition of West Indian barrack-yard stories.  Imhoff brings home to the reader/audience in scene after scene the realities of poverty in contemporary Guyana, contrasting them with scenes of middle-class romanticizing observers  of poverty (in a newspaper office) .

Grace Nichols’s Blood and Wedding: A Guyana/Caribbean Version of Lorca’s Tragedy is a retelling  of Garcia Lorca’s rural Spanish drama of passion and love, death and betrayal.  Retaining much of Lorca’s narrative development, characterization, and motifs, Nichols adapts the play to a Guyanese-Caribbean world with modifications such as a Chorus of cane-cutters (speaking in Guyanese demotic) and the figure of Death in the form of the Kanaima of Amerindian folklore.

Best First Book of Poetry

No Nominations

Best First Book of Fiction

No nominations.  The judges note that though there are several promising first books of fiction, they regret to announce that none measured up to the criteria of excellence.

THE JURY

These Judges for the Guyana Prize for Literature, who had to be selected from both within and outside of Guyana, are Juanita Cox, Victor Ramraj (Chairman), Brendan de Caires, Elfrieda Bissember and Louis Regis.

Juanita Cox of the UK, is currently highly regarded as the leading researcher on Edgar Mittelholzer and one of the foremost authorities on his work.  She is writing her PhD thesis on Edgar Mittelholzer and the Shaping of his Novels at the University of Birmingham in England, and is an Associate Fellow of the London Metropolitan University, where she lectured in Caribbean Studies and Black British History.

She has researched extensively and has several publications  including Introductions to recently republished editions of Mittelholzer’s novels , critical essays and conference papers.  Among these are a critical anthology, In the Eye of the Storm - Edgar Mittelholzer (1909-1965) and a compendium of Mittelholzer's early works including his short stories, plays and unpublished poems are due to be published in 2012. 

Her publications include 'Edgar Mittelholzer: A Caribbean Voice' (Stabroek News and Guyana Review, 2008), 'Music and Symbolism' in Edgar Mittelholzer’s The Life and Death of Sylvia (Guyana Art’s Journal, 2009) and introductions to the recently republished editions of Mittelholzer's Corentyne Thunder (2009), and The Life and Death of Sylvia (2010).  Papers include Corentyne Thunder: A Quiet Revolution (Castellani House, 2009).  

Prof Victor J. Ramraj, who is the Chairman of the Jury, is Professor of English at the University of Calgary, where he has been on faculty since 1970.  

He has numerous publications on International English literature, including an early book on the Canadian writer Mordecai Richler (1983), reissued in DiscLit: World Authors, (1993), an anthology Concert of Voices: An Anthology of World Writing in English (1995, 2009) and  Postindependence Voices in South Asian Writing (2001), co-edited with A. Hashmi and M. Lal.  Added to these are several plenary lectures  including Nobel Lectures on Derek Walcott (1993) and V. S. Naipaul (2001).  

Prof Ramraj  was editor of the prominent journal ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature.  (1990—2001), was President of the Canadian Association of Learned Journals (CALJ), 1999-2001, and of the Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (CACLALS), 1992-95. 

He was chief judge of the Guyana Prize,2004-05, and of the 2000 Annual Raja Rao Award (for most distinguished writer of the Indian Diaspora), and judge of SSHRC-ASPP (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) Book Prize, 2001, and of the Commonwealth Writers Prize,1999-2001.  

Prof Ramraj also won the Playwright of the Year Award for his play “The Dead Son,” Georgetown, Guyana, 1966.

Brendan de Caires, born in Guyana and now living in Toronto, is an editor, book reviewer and literary critic.  He has worked as an editor for various publishers, including the MEP in Trinidad and Tobago., and written book reviews for Caribbean Beat, the BWIA on-air magazine,  Kyk-Over-Al, the Stabroek News, and the Literary Review of Canada.

De Caires has published articles in Kyk-Over-Al and The Caribbean Review of Books on the works of Martin Carter, Derek Walcott, among others.  

He is currently the Programme Coordinator at Pen Canada and an Associate Editor at the Caribbean Review of Books. 

Elfrieda Bissember has been the Director of the National Gallery of Art, Castellani House, and Curator of the National Collection of Art since 1996. She studied Painting and the History of Art in the United Kingdom before returning to Guyana in the mid-1980’s, where she then taught as Tutor in Drawing, Painting and the History of Art at the Burrowes School of Art from 1986 to 1991.  

She served as the art critic of the Guyana Review magazine from its inception in 1993 until 2001, and has been an elected member of the International Association of Art Critics since 1998, and was a member of the Jury for the Guyana Prize in 2007. 

She has been a member of several committees and groups over the years involved in the presentation and preservation of the arts and culture of Guyana. In her role as Director she has presented several programmes on Guyanese literature and Guyanese writers, as well as on the visual arts, and organised literary and other arts events at the National Gallery. She currently represents Castellani House as a member of the board of the Museums Association of the Caribbean. 

Louis Regis born in Trinidad & Tobago, is a member of the Department of Liberal Arts at the St Augustine Campus of the University of the West Indies in Trinidad.  He lectures in Literatures in English in the literature programmes and in Cultural Studies. 

Dr Regis is a specialist on West Indian Literature and on the culture of Trinidad, with a special interest in carnival,  calypso, its literature and culture, and has done extensive research on the calypso, soca and other carnival traditions.  

Dr Regis has published widely and presented conference papers on literature and carnival.  These include a published book  on calypsonian Black Stalin, Black Stalin: Kaisonian,   as well as “The Political Calypso : the True Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago”,    “The African Presence in the pre-independence Trinidad Carnival”, “Ah Never Get Weary Yet:  Rohler’s 40 Years in Calypso”.