Winner of the 2025 Bocas Prize for Poetry and now in contention for the overall award, Anthony Vahni Capildeo returns to Trinidad for a festival aptly themed “Always Coming Home”—bringing with them a poetics forged in exile, resistance, and the belief that “No individual has true freedom till all are free.”
In March 2025, Anthony Vahni Capildeo—Trinidadian-born, UK-based poet, essayist, and scholar—was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry, one of the 21st century’s most significant international literary honours.
Administered by Yale University, the prize money carries an unrestricted grant and recognises writers whose work shows “exceptional literary achievement and promise”.
At the 2025 Bocas Lit Fest, Capildeo’s Polkadot Wounds will be in contention for the overall OCM Bocas Prize, alongside Dionne Brand’s non-fiction and Myriam J A Chancy’s fiction. Yet the significance of Bocas here lies not in competition but in return.
Capildeo has long maintained connections with the festival and with Trinidad’s cultural life, including an association with the Belmont Exotic Stylish Sailors, a traditional mas band whose defiant aesthetics echo Capildeo’s poetics: formal, rooted, uncolonised.
Capildeo’s selection for both prizes is not a surprise, though it is long overdue.
Their poetry—spanning nine full-length collections and numerous pamphlets—has, for over two decades, challenged the formal, national, and even grammatical boundaries of the Anglophone canon.
With the 2025 Windham-Campbell and the concurrent award in the Poetry category of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (for Polkadot Wounds), a regional and global consensus appears to have formed around a singular proposition: that Capildeo is one of the most original and intellectually rigorous poets writing today.
Their latest collection, Polkadot Wounds (Carcanet, 2024), is preoccupied with scale: the intimacy of bodily pain against the vastness of history and landscape. The title is deceptive in its softness; the poems are filled with sonic, linguistic, and historical ruptures. They do not cohere; they resist. Their relationship with language is both intimate and historical. Their poems are not structured around anecdote or affect but around syntax, etymology, drift.
Their 2016 collection Measures of Expatriation (Carcanet) won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, a rare achievement for a Caribbean writer based in Britain who is writing in a hybrid form that blurs lyric, essay, and philosophical meditation.
Still, institutional recognition has lagged—perhaps due to the complexity of their output—work often seen as “difficult” by those who remain conditioned to expect clarity as comfort and identity as a confession.
Capildeo has always written in difficult circumstances—emotionally and physically—in a creative momentum that almost disassociates itself from the writer’s physcial life.. The Windham-Campbell Prize is not, then, a coronation. It is a relief.
“I have been living a small and precarious personal life—working part-time partly to have creative flexibility, partly to be free to care for family in Trinidad and stay connected, and partly because of chronic ill health.
“The Windham-Campbell prize takes away a lot of practical concerns I had about growing older. For me the work of writing is an endless quest for truth and connexion, both in language, between languages, and between people.”
If the intention of the prize was to encourage great work in difficult physical and emotional spaces, it will do that.
Capildeo says, “With the Windham-Campbell prize, I shall be able to ‘give back’ a little, shore myself up. I am incredibly grateful to Donald Windham and Sandy Campbell for creating ground where future poets can flourish.”
Capildeo, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Writer in Residence at the University of York, trained as a medievalist at Oxford.
Anthony Vahni Capildeo was born in 1973 in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, into the distinguished Capildeo family, which includes Nobel Laureate V S Naipaul. They moved to the United Kingdom in 1991 to study at Christ Church, Oxford, where they earned a DPhil in Old Norse literature and translation theory as a Rhodes Scholar.
Their colonial education may be sound, but their refusal to conform extends beyond form. They reject the mythology of solitary genius.
“There is no such thing as The Author (except the author of creation).
“The sooner we get away from the myth of heroic individuals or the yearning for godlike mentors, the better. As a child, I did not have words for this belief. I was surrounded by excellent wordcraft: my mother, making up stories; my father, teaching me by his observation of nature and the example of his poetry, despite his personal illness and the family cruelty he faced.”
In this, Capildeo departs from their relative V S Naipaul, whose work (while formal, masterful) often sustained a vision of the author as omniscient observer.
Capildeo, by contrast, disassembles the premise of the self-contained writer.
“I have been able to write only because people kept me alive; many Trinidadian women.
“Give thanks for the woman who spent days and nights tending me when terrible working conditions in Brexit Britain floored me. My walking companions, exchanging miles of wisdom in sun and rain. The ones without ‘education’ have insight sharper than a two-edged sword. Together, they collectively author our story–ways of making sense out of our entanglement in histories that textbooks ignore; our living heritage that embarrasses museums.”
Work rooted in activism and commitment to social justice
Capildeo’s work is deeply rooted in activism and a commitment to social justice. In 2023, they joined over 2,000 artists in signing an open letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, condemning the collective punishment of Palestinians, and urging governments to end military support for Israel.
In 2024, they endorsed an open letter demanding that the investment firm Baillie Gifford divest from fossil fuels and companies profiting from Israeli occupation. The letter, signed by numerous writers and literary professionals, called for literary organisations to sever ties with Baillie Gifford until such divestments occurred.
Capildeo has also supported the rights of precarious academic workers, librarians, and independent booksellers. They have publicly backed strike actions by the University and College Union (UCU) in the UK and often foreground the work of trade unionists and book workers as “essential to any serious culture of literature.”
Through these actions, Capildeo exemplifies a form of literary activism that is both deeply personal and universally resonant, embodying a poetics that refuses to separate the aesthetic from the ethical—all encapsulated in their belief that “No individual has true freedom till all are free.”
Capildeo’s bibliography is vast and varied. It includes Skin Can Hold (2019), Venus as a Bear (2018), Utter (2013), and Person Animal Figure (2005), among others. They also produce pamphlets—limited-run, small press, often collaborative—such as Odyssey Calling (Sad Press, 2020) and Light Site (Periplum Poetry, 2020).
The tone of their work shifts from forensic to incantatory, from deeply interior to outward-facing and polemical. But what remains constant is the commitment to listening. Capildeo writes not to pronounce but to absorb the granular truth of being human.
Polkadot Wounds, their ninth collection, expands that trajectory. Composed partly during a residency in Cornwall, the poems address the afterlife of empire, environmental collapse, and the intimacy of care. There is little resolution. Instead, the work pulses with uncertainty, dislocation, and physical vulnerability.
Capildeo’s poetry exists within a rich Caribbean lineage. Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Lorna Goodison, and Martin Carter each forged poetic vocabularies for the post-colonial condition. Walcott laboured for decades to graft classical form onto Caribbean landscapes. Brathwaite shattered the line, privileging what he called “nation language.” Carter spoke of the need to “write a happier alphabet.” Capildeo carries this tradition forward with deep resistance to commodification. Their poetry refuses the spectacle of identity.
This makes their work necessary—not only for Caribbean literature but also for contemporary letters more broadly. It exists in the gaps others prefer not to name: between care and collapse, between breath and syntax, between the individual and the collective.
What Capildeo offers is not a voice. It is a structure of feeling. A scaffolding. A way to survive while remaining close to the truth of oneself and the world.
In their own words: “The book is part of a global ecology of material and ideas. In this, let us choose life.”
Returning to Bocas Lit Fest
This May, Capildeo returns to the Bocas Lit Fest in Port-of-Spain, not simply as a laureate but as a teacher, collaborator, and celebrant of language. On Saturday, May 3, they will speak with Lawrence Scott and Michael Kelleher in a panel on poetry, memory, and longing. On Sunday, May 4, Capildeo leads a poetry workshop titled “If Freedom Writes No Happier Alphabet”, inspired by Martin Carter’s poetic call to reimagine language in the name of liberation. No prior experience is required. Only attention.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY—ANTHONY VAHNI CAPILDEO
• Polkadot Wounds (2024, Carcanet)
• A Happiness (2022, Intergraphia)
• Like a Tree, Walking (2021, Carcanet)
• Skin Can Hold (2019, Carcanet)
• Venus as a Bear (2018, Carcanet)
• Measures of Expatriation (2016, Carcanet)—Forward Prize Winner
• Utter (2013, Peepal Tree Press)
• Person Animal Figure (2005, Landfill Press)
• No Traveller Returns (2003, Salt Publishing)
BOCAS LIT FEST—15 YEARS OF HOME
Celebrating its 15th year, the 2025 Bocas Lit Fest is themed “Always Coming Home”, with a programme of free readings, panels, book launches, open mics, children’s events, and the 15-year commemoration of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.
Full programme at bocaslitfest.com
@bocaslitfest on Facebook, Instagram, and X
Ira Mathur is a Guardian Media journalist and the winner of the 2023 Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction for her memoir, Love The Dark Days. Website: www.irasroom.org. Author inquiries: irasroom@gmail.com