The icon­ic Bar­ba­di­an po­et Ka­mau Brath­waite, who died in Feb­ru­ary this year, would have been 90 on May 11.

To mark the oc­ca­sion, the Bo­cas Lit Fest—which re­cent­ly ho­n­oured Brath­waite with the 2020 Bo­cas Hen­ry Swanzy Award—is host­ing an on­line cel­e­bra­tion of the po­et’s work and lega­cy.

The fes­ti­val team has re­leased a spe­cial­ly com­mis­sioned video, fea­tur­ing a read­ing of Brath­waite’s po­em “Wake” by thir­teen writ­ers from across the Caribbean. It in­cludes past win­ners of the OCM Bo­cas Prize for Po­et­ry, along­side oth­er writ­ers sched­uled to par­tic­i­pate in the 2020 NGC Bo­cas Lit Fest—now post­poned to 18–20 Sep­tem­ber.

The video is avail­able at the web­page www.bo­caslit­fest.com/cel­e­brat­ing-ka­mau.brath­waite, and is al­so post­ed to the fes­ti­val’s YouTube and Face­book pages.

In ad­di­tion, the NGC Bo­cas Lit Fest team have cu­rat­ed a se­lec­tion of links from around the web, bring­ing to­geth­er po­ems by Brath­waite, archival au­dio and video record­ings, and trib­utes to his lit­er­ary lega­cy—a vir­tu­al birth­day present for lovers of Brath­waite and of Caribbean po­et­ry, say the or­gan­is­ers.

Oth­er com­mem­o­ra­tions of Brath­waite’s 90th birth­day in­clude the on­line project 40 Nights of the Voice, or­gan­ised by a Cana­da-based col­lec­tive. Start­ed last Mon­day, for 40 nights, the project will re­lease videos of Brath­waite’s work, read by a di­verse ar­ray of writ­ers and schol­ars, via the Twit­ter ac­count @Ka­mau­Remix.

Po­et­ry lovers every­where are in­vit­ed to join in by post­ing their own videos, with the hash­tags #Ka­mauBrath­waite and #40Night­sofT­heVoice.

The Brath­waite trib­ute video is just one of nu­mer­ous on­line ac­tiv­i­ties rolled as part of the NGC Bo­cas Lit Fest, both to mark the tenth year of the fes­ti­val and to en­gage read­ers and writ­ers dur­ing the pe­ri­od of so­cial dis­tanc­ing due to the COVID-19 out­break.

The tenth NGC Bo­cas Lit Fest will take place from Sep­tem­ber 18-20. Ti­tle spon­sor is the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny, lead spon­sor is First Cit­i­zens, main spon­sors are the Min­istry of Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment, Cul­ture and the Arts and One Caribbean Me­dia. The Na­tion­al Lot­ter­ies Con­trol Board, Massy Foun­da­tion and UWI are spon­sors.