Once again, the Burt Award for Caribbean Young Adult Literature has delivered on its mandate which is ‘to champion literacy, build language skills and foster the love and habit of reading by ensuring that young Caribbean readers have access to books that they want to read’ by gracing the region (and further afield) with three new novels that are written and designed to woo man, woman, boy and girl back to books, to the pleasure of reading and to all the glories associated with reading, reading of good literature, for these three prize-winning books are all different in style and tone and theme while sharing in common a few literary features like social realism and first person narrative falling into various literary genres of drama, action/adventure, mystery/thriller and satire. All three narrators are in their early teens and are all females which mean that the female voice is given its rightful place in our literature, even the lone male author, Kevin Jared Hosein, does not deny the female her voice, another magnanimous stride forward for Caribbean literature.
‘Home Home’ by Lisa Allen-Agostini tackles large current issues about gays and mental health, the varying approaches by different societies, demystifying them with dramatic ease using dialogues and situational/circumstantial conflicts. Home Home is about a depressed teenage girl sent from the tropical Island of Trinidad to the temperate climate of Canada to recover from a malady that is not viewed seriously by the layman. Not only is the climate different but responses to various issues are different. However her recovery is effected by her lesbian aunt and partner, a gorgeous looking boy and her best friend back home (using the mobile phone; technology is prominent here).
The telling is engaging and educational also highly entertaining.
The beast of Kukuyo, a dark tale, by Kevin Jared Hosein is an intriguing mystery/thriller that also falls into the category of satire – taking potshots at the sordidness in a rural village while balancing it with some beautiful acts. This book is action-packed,
many- layered and suspenseful, cleverly composed not unlike ‘Murder, She Wrote’ – the reader is not sure who is the victim, the suspect or the killer until the end.
The Art of Whites Roses by Viviana Prado-Nunez, set in 1957 in Marianao, a suburb on the outskirts of Havana, Cuba, during the revolution, is a fast paced novel comprising of thirty-five chapter in 182 pages, where people disappear while the narrator also witness sincerity and an infidelity, fear and hope.
The Burt Award for Caribbean Literature was established by CODE (the Canadian Organisation for Development through Education) with ‘generous support of Canadian philanthropist William Burt and the Literary Prizes Foundation, in partnership the ‘NGC Bocas Lit. Fest’ of Trinidad and Tobago. The mandate of CODE is profoundly captured in the following statement, ‘If you can read and write, you can learn to do, and be, anything’.
This award is designed to operate on three vital levels of a vibrant literary landscape – staging writers’ workshops, offering huge monetary prizes, transforming manuscripts into books which are printed in the thousands. The book publishing aspect will translate in providing jobs for a whole range of people including book cover designers, illustrators, copyeditors, book binders, ….. Perhaps, a fourth dimension to the Award is its ability to distribute the books (free of cost) among Caribbean countries.
The above is spelt out in the objective of the award which is ‘to champion literacy, build language skills and foster the love and habit of reading by ensuring that young Caribbean readers have access to books that they want to read’.
These three prize-winning books are now available locally; entrusted to the Guyana Book Foundation for distribution to libraries and schools.
Guyanese author, Imam Baksh, has won this award on two occasions.
What’s Happening:
Sasenarine Persaud has just released his fourteenth book, Monsoon on the Fingers of God, and was honoured with HAF Award (https://www.hafsite.org/) for the Advancement of Dharmic Arts and Humanities. Part of the citation reads: ‘to recognize your significant yet humble contributions towards enlightening and educating others through your many inspiring literary works of dharmic values and traditions’.
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