For the first time in its nine-year his­to­ry, the OCM Bo­cas Prize for Caribbean Lit­er­a­ture has been won by a work of non-fic­tion.

Kevin Ado­nis Browne claimed the lit­er­ary prize for his book High Mas: Car­ni­val and the Po­et­ics of Caribbean Cul­ture dur­ing the award cer­e­mo­ny held at the Old Fire Sta­tion in Port-of Spain on Sat­ur­day night.

Browne was an­nounced as the win­ner by chief judge Dame Ma­ri­na Warn­er.

Speak­ing to the me­dia fol­low­ing the event, Browne, who is a lec­tur­er at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies’ St Au­gus­tine Cam­pus’ De­part­ment of Lit­er­ary, Cul­tur­al, and Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Stud­ies, said the vic­to­ry was for his stu­dents.

“It feels won­der­ful to be val­i­dat­ed, to have the work that you have done over the past few years to be recog­nised in this kind of way is, of course, go­ing to be ex­cit­ing and hum­bling and all of that,” Browne said.

“But I think it is less for me per­son­al­ly than for the work that I do. I see my­self pri­mar­i­ly as a teacher so I am think­ing about how my stu­dents are go­ing to ben­e­fit from the work that I do,” he said.

High Mas is Browne’s sec­ond book.

The first was Trop­ic Ten­den­cies: Rhetoric, Pop­u­lar Cul­ture, and the An­glo­phone Caribbean.

“High Mas is a book that in­volves four se­ries pho­tographs that have ac­com­pa­ny­ing es­says so the pho­to­graph­ic se­ries are Blue Dev­ils, Moko Jumbies, the La Di­a­b­lesse that Tra­cy Sankar played in 2015, and Jou­vay Ay­i­ti per­form­ing their mas on Eman­ci­pa­tion Day,” Browne said.

Browne said the book was fin­ished back in Jan­u­ary 2017 and pub­lished last year by the Uni­ver­si­ty Press of Mis­sis­sip­pi. Browne said it was an “im­mense ho­n­our” to be recog­nised the same year Earl Lovelace’s The Drag­on Can’t Dance turned 40 years old since he wrote his dis­ser­ta­tion on it when he was do­ing his doc­tor­ate at the Penn­syl­va­nia State Uni­ver­si­ty.

“I read The Drag­on Can’t Dance as the­o­ry, not just fic­tion or art, the­o­ry that chal­lenged me to do this kind of work,” he said.

Warn­er de­scribed Browne’s book as “huge­ly en­er­getic.”

“This is a huge­ly en­er­getic, orig­i­nal, mul­ti-faceted, deeply en­gaged ac­tion in book form, which takes up what he calls the mag­ic of per­ish­able things,” Warn­er said.

“Kevin Ado­nis Browne moves be­tween mem­oir and his­to­ry, aes­thet­ics and gen­der pol­i­tics, vi­su­al im­agery, po­et­ry and prose to think about Car­ni­val and mas as a high­ly orig­i­nal and per­son­al depth,” she said.

“He is trou­bled and his ma­te­r­i­al is trou­bling but the book took me and the oth­er judges to un­ex­pect­ed di­men­sions of un­der­stand­ing and awe at hu­man com­plex­i­ty and depth,” Warn­er said.

Jour­nal­ist and ed­i­tor Gary Younge who was part of the judg­ing pan­el for non-fic­tion work said High Mas was “im­pres­sive, lyri­cal and in­no­v­a­tive.”

“Im­pres­sive in scope, lyri­cal in style, and in­no­v­a­tive in form, High Mas is im­pact­ful both as lit­er­a­ture and art,” Younge said.

“Kevin Ado­nis Browne’s ex­cep­tion­al ex­plo­ration of mas blends pho­to­graph­ic es­say, mem­oir, po­et­ry, polemic, prose, po­et­ry and prose, to trans­for­ma­tive ef­fect.

The gim­let style pho­tog­ra­phy forms an in­te­gral part of the ac­tion demon­strat­ing the in­sep­a­ra­bil­i­ty be­tween mask and mas, go­ing be­yond the his­to­ry and nar­ra­tive Browne peers in­to the soul of the peo­ple with whom he feels a deep kin­ship, the re­sult is a rad­i­cal genre-de­fy­ing trib­ute to a cher­ished lega­cy in the finest tra­di­tion of lit­er­ary non-fic­tion,” he said.

Browne earned US$10,000 for his win.