The fourth annual NGC Bocas Literary Festival, which begins this Wednesday and runs until Sunday, is going to examine the hot topic of crime over the course of different events, including a panel debate that will bring together some of T&T's most respected minds and a musical debate between extempo champions Short Pants and Black Sage.The crime-related events will be among a myriad of others that highlight Caribbean poetry and prose, including films, poetry slams and award presentations."Bocas is a festival not just of poetry and fiction–which is what most people think of when they hear 'literature'–and not just about entertainment, but also a festival of ideas," said Bocas Programme Director Nicholas Laughlin. "We try to use recent books to ask provocative questions about our time and place, and to open a space for real debate that gets past the sensational and the quick, reliable thrills and horrors of every morning's newspaper headlines."
The Bocas debate on crime will take place on Saturday afternoon at the Port-of-Spain Library, where most of the festival events will be held.Defence attorney Gregory Delzin, director of the Police Complaints Authority Gillian Lucky, Bishop Claude Berkeley, and retired Col Lyle Alexander of the Defence Force will tackle the topic Crime: Breaking the Circle.UK High Commissioner Arthur Snell, who had run security and crime-fighting programmes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen before his posting in T&T, will chair the debate.Later that same day, Guardian columnist Debbie Jacob will talk about Wishing for Wings, her book about her experience teaching CXC English to young offenders at the YTC. Guardian Media editor-in-chief Judy Raymond will guide the conversation, which will include two of Jacob's former students.The festival will also feature a day-long crime fiction workshop on Wednesday. It's a genre that is hardly pursued by T&T writers. Festival director Marina Salandy-Brown said she finds this fact surprising considering that crime tops the list of people's concerns in the country.
"It strikes me as very odd that we don't really write about crime," said Salandy-Brown, during the launch of the festival March 19 at Nalis in Port-of-Spain. "We never developed that genre of writing."Internationally there's "a huge tradition of writing crime", said Salandy-Brown, with "a lot of money" to be made and "lots of prizes" to be won. The workshop will be facilitated by two writers Salandy-Brown called "masters of the genre", Allan Guthrie and Denisa Mina.Guthrie's books include Kiss Her Goodbye and his award-winning debut Two-Way Split. Mina is an author and playwright whose books, The Field of Blood and The Dead Hour, have been made into films.On Friday Guthrie and Mina will join Amanda Smyth, an Irish author with T&T heritage and US publisher Johnny Temple of Akashic Books for a discussion on "the varieties of crime writing and how fiction about the dark side helps us understand our society's problems".
Smyth's 2013 novel A Kind of Eden has violent crime at its heart. Akashic Books publishes an award-winning series of crime collections called Akashic Noir. Trinidad Noir, published in the series in 2008, features the writing of Robert Antoni, Elizabeth Nunez, Kevin Baldeosingh and Keith Jardim, among others.After the discussion "an unprecedented debate in verse" between extempo artists Short Pants and Black Sage will take place. The topic: Are there more criminals in prison or in office?The day of the discussion and extempo debate has been dubbed Bloody Friday.The NGC Bocas Festival is the largest literary festival in the English-speaking Caribbean. Last year more than 4,500 people attended.
Info:bocaslitfest.com