The OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature

Dionne Brand explores English and American literature, and the colonial aesthetic that shaped her sense of self and the world, of what was possible and what was not.

Coloniality constructs outsides and insidesworlds to be chosen, disturbed, interpreted, and navigatedin order to live something like a real self.

In Salvage, the internationally acclaimed poet and novelist Dionne Brand offers a bracing account of reading, life, and what remains in the wreck of empire. Uniquely and powerfully blending criticism and autobiography as artifact, Brand explores her encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes in famous and familiar books, looking particularly at the extraordinary implications and modern-day reverberations of stories such as Robinson Crusoe and Mansfield Park; the ways that practices of reading and writing are shaped by those narrative structures; and the challenges of writing a narrative of Black life that attends to its own expression and consciousness.

Making and remaking the self in relation to these dominant cultural narratives, Brand learned to read the literature of two empires, the British and the American, in an anti-colonial lightin order to survive, in order to live.

The scene is the act of reading. The book, another kind of forensics. A forensics of the literary substance of which the author is made and must recover from, and if not recover, then piece together as artifact. Much more than autobiography or a work of literary criticism, Salvage is gripping, witty, revelatory, and essential reading by one of our most powerful and brilliant writers.

Winner of the Scotland National Book Awards (Poetry Book of the Year) 2025
Winner of the WindhamCampbell Prize for Poetry 2025
Winner of the OCM Bocas Poetry Prize for Caribbean Literature 2025
A Telegraph Book of the Year 2024

Polkadot Wounds is a delight, wrestling with life in our restless times. Capildeo entices us to enter conversations with others (dead and living), amongst glimpsing reflections of encounters. Landscapes become “landskips,” playing on traditions of travel and nature writing, childlike spontaneity, and movement across gaps.

Dante’s Divine Comedy frames untimely deaths and breakthroughs of joy, during the pandemic and in queer and farflung communities. The title of the book is inspired by the stones of the ruined Norman castle in Launceston, Cornwall, and the local martyr, St Cuthbert Mayne, where Capildeo was writerinresidence with the Charles Causley Trust.

A TIME Best Book of April

Winner of the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature

“Chancy is one of our most brilliant writers and storytellers.” —Edwidge Danticat

“Myriam J. A. Chancy is a masterful writer.” —José Olivarez

From awardwinning author Myriam J. A. Chancy comes an extraordinary and enduring story of two families—forever joined by country, and by longheld secrets—and two girls with a bond that refuses to be broken.

In 1940s PortauPrince, Gertie and Sisi become fast childhood friends, despite being on opposite ends of the social and economic ladder. As young girls, they build their unlikely friendship—until a deathbed revelation ripples through their families and tears them apart. After Franois Duvalier’s rule turns deadly in the 1950s, Sisi moves to Paris, while Gertie marries into a wealthy Dominican family. Across decades and continents, through personal successes and failures, they are parted and reunited, slowly learning the truth of their singular relationship. Finally, six decades later, with both women in the United States, a sudden phone call brings them back together once more to reckon with and—perhaps—forgive the past.

Told with power and frankness, Village Weavers confronts the silences around class, race, and nationality, charts the moments when lives are irrevocably forced apart, and envisions two girls—connected their entire lives—who try to break inherited cycles of mistrust and find ways back into each other’s hearts.