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>>>LITERARY COMPETITIONS, CONTESTS, etc

Jamaicans among writers in contention for Hollick Arvon Prize [2 pics: Barbara and Diana]

The Bocas Lit Fest has announced the list of finalists for the region’s only prize for emerging writers, the Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize.

Writers from 12 Caribbean countries are in the running for the highly coveted 2015 Hollick Arvon Prize that attracted 53 entries, the largest ever since the prize started.

Two emerging Jamaican writers, two from Bahamas and one from Puerto Rico and five from Trinidad and Tobago are the 10 finalists for the much-coveted prize that will come to an end this year unless a new Caribbean sponsor is found.

The prize, co-founded and administered by The Bocas Lit Fest and worth over US$15,000, will give the winning Caribbean-based writer time to advance a poetry collection. In previous years the prize was open to writers of fiction and non-fiction. It includes a year’s mentoring by an established author and travel to the United Kingdom to attend a one-week intensive creative writing course of their choice at Arvon.

The winning writer will also receive a cash award of 3,000GBP or US$4,500, have three days in London to network with literary professionals, hosted by the UK’s leading creative writing organisation, Arvon, in association with Free Word Centre and agents Rogers, Coleridge & White who have first option of agenting the winning writer.

“The longlist for the 2015 Hollick Arvon Prize can boast of poets who shuttle an ability to manipulate language to create poetry that is narratively fluent and thematically current and engaging,” noted a statement from the judges.

It was a blind competition between 16 men and 37 women. “The judges did not know who they were judging, female or male, but we commend the sensitive and subtle handling of subject matters which range from submerged family histories through domestic abuse to sexual self-discovery and the loss of memory”, said Funso Aiyejina, chair of the international judging panel of five that comprises Caroline Hollick – representative of the sponsors of the award – poet and scholar Edward Baugh, Ruth Borthwick of Arvon, and London literary agent Jennifer Hewson.

The winner will be announced at the 2015 NGC Bocas Lit Fest, which runs from April 29 to May 3 in Port of Spain at the National Library.

NGC is the title sponsor of the annual literary festival. First Citizens is the lead sponsor, OCM and the Ministry of Planning & Sustainable Planning are main sponsors. Please see www.bocaslitfest.com for more information.

The longlisted writers are:

Monica Minott, Jamaica

Peta-Gaye V Williams, Jamaica

Shivanee Ramlochan, Trinidad and Tobago

Elliot Bastien, Trinidad and Tobago

Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné, Trinidad and Tobago

Zahra Gordon, Trinidad and Tobago

Lynn Sweeting, The Bahamas

Nicolette Bethel, The Bahamas

Richard Georges, British Virgin Islands

Xavier Navarro, Puerto Rico

Elizabeth McCracken wins $20,000 short story prize

Elizabeth McCracken, a US fiction writer praised for her sharply detailed stories of grief and disaster, has won a $20,000-prize.

McCracken won the Story Prize for her collection Thunderstruck, award officials recently announced. Her other books include the novel The Giant’s House and the memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination.

The two finalists, Lorrie Moore for Bark and Francesca Marciano for The Other Language, will each receive $5,000.

The Story Prize, underwritten by the non-profit Chisholm Foundation, was established in 2004 and honours the author “of an outstanding collection of short fiction”. Previous winners include Mary Gordon, Anthony Doerr and George Saunders.

10 emerging writers each receive $50,000-prize

Four poets and three fiction writers are among the winners of a $50,000 prize given to emerging artists of exceptional promise in the United States.

Recently, the Whiting Foundation announced 10 recipients of the Whiting Award. The award was founded 30 years ago and previously given to Jonathan Franzen, Tony Kushner and David Foster Wallace, among others. Each honoree receives $50,000.

Winners this year include poets Anthony Carelli, Jenny Johnson, Aracelis Girmay and Roger Reeves. Also cited were fiction writers Leopoldine Core, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi and Dan Josefson, dramatists Anne Washburn and Lucas Hnath and essayist Elena Passarello.

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Writer credits: Sharon Leach

Author News:

In Israel, biracial German author probes her Nazi heritage [pic: teege]

JERUSALEM (AP) – When Jennifer Teege stumbled upon a book in a Hamburg library seven years ago, the biracial German woman who was given up for adoption as a child was stunned to discover a deep family secret that shook her to the core.

Her maternal grandfather was the brutal SS Commander Amon Goeth, who ran a concentration camp in Plaszow, Poland, in World War II and whose cruelty was so chillingly portrayed by actor Ralph Fiennes in the 1993 Oscar-winning movie Schindler’s List.

“It really turned my world upside down,” said Teege, who has written a memoir about her soul-searching experience entitled My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me – a reference to the Nazis’ racist ideology.

In Israel, her story resonates on many levels. The country is home to the world’s largest community of Holocaust survivors. It is also the place where Teege lived as a student for several years, became fluent in Hebrew and first saw Steven Spielberg’s epic movie – long before she knew the dark secret of her origins.

Discovering that she traced her lineage to a man described as “the symbol of evil” sent Teege into intensive psychotherapy. Her therapist broke down in tears when he heard her tale, she said.

“It was very difficult for me to deal with this because I have a very unique relationship to Israel and with the Jewish people,” said the 44-year-old Teege, now a mother of two. She spoke to The Associated Press on the sidelines of the Jerusalem International Book Fair that showcased her book’s Hebrew edition. An English version is coming out in April.

Goeth was notorious for shooting Jewish inmates for sport at the concentration camp in Plaszow, a Krakow suburb, and for getting his dogs to attack them. The German industrialist Oskar Schindler saved more than 1,200 Jews by bribing Goeth and other Nazis to have them work in his factories rather than be sent for extermination in death camps.

Known as the “Butcher of Plaszow,” Goeth was convicted as a war criminal and hanged in 1946.

Teege’s astounding revelation and the book that followed were just the latest chapters in her troubled biography, from a childhood spent in foster homes to a prolonged estrangement from both her biological parents, to her struggles with prejudice in Germany because of her dark skin and the suicide of her grandmother, with whom she was very close.

It all led to several bouts of depression, but she said that finding out about her ancestry helped bring a “sense of closure”.

“Life is like a puzzle, so today I have a lot of pieces that were missing,” she said. “It is a story that you would never ever invent because no one would believe that it is true. But it is true.”

Teege’s maternal grandmother, Ruth Irene Kalder, was a secretary in Schindler’s factory and it was he who introduced her to Goeth, whose wife remained in Austria while he ran Plaszow.

Their affair produced Teege’s mother, Monika Hertwig, whose memoir I Have to Love My Father, Right? was the book Teege found in the Hamburg library that set her on her journey.

Teege’s mother had a brief affair with a Nigerian student but was already in another relationship by the time Teege was born in 1970, and she was sent to an orphanage as an infant. She maintained occasional contact with both her mother and grandmother until she was formally adopted at the age of seven. When she was 13, she found out that her grandmother had killed herself and only much later in life did she track down her biological father in Africa.

In her early 20s, long before discovering her family legacy, she followed a friend to Israel, where she learned Hebrew and completed an undergraduate degree at Tel Aviv University. She then returned to Germany, married and started a family.

She sees a physical resemblance between herself and Goeth but believes he would turn over in the grave if he learned he had a black granddaughter with close ties to Israel and Jews.

She said one of the things that motivated her to write her book was reading an interview with the grandniece of Nazi leader Hermann Goering, who told the AP in 2008 that she had herself sterilised to end her blood line.

Teege rejects the premise of such an extreme measure.

“You decide who you want to be. It is your character and you set an example that you can be different. It is not connected to genes,” she said.

The hardest part for Teege was reconciling how Goeth, a killer of Jews, was also the man her grandmother deeply loved.

“I cannot understand how she could have loved him. I think this was the biggest problem that I had,” she said.

In Israel, Teege met with one of the few people left in the world who actually came face-to-face with Goeth.

Rena Birnhack, an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor who was on Schindler’s list – the famous list naming those who were to be spared for labour – remembers being confronted by a tall, daunting Goeth at the “selection” line after the Krakow ghetto was liquidated.

Goeth decided who would be deported to Auschwitz and who would live a bit longer in his labour camp. Under a blanket, Birnhack held two puppies and offered them as a gift. Goeth let her live.

Decades later, reading Teege’s book, Birnhack found out Goeth kept the puppies and Kalder raised them in their home inside the Plaszow camp. She asked her granddaughter to track down the author and they met in the Israeli city of Haifa last week.

“All the memories came rushing back,” an emotional Birnhack said of the meeting. “Among the hundreds that he killed, he kept me alive … I can’t forgive the Germans for what they did to us but I have sympathy for Jennifer.”

Follow Heller on Twitter @aronhellerap

>>>OBIT

South African novelist Andre Brink dies [pic: brink]

JOHANNESBURG (AP) – Prolific author, Andre Brink, who used his work to question the policies of South Africa’s apartheid regime, has died, his publishers said. He was 79 years old.

Brink died aboard a KLM flight travelling from the Netherlands to the South African city of Cape Town on Friday February 6, the South African Press Association reported. Brink was travelling from Belgium, where he was receiving an honorary doctorate from the Catholic University of Louvain.

In his speech during the ceremony, Brink spoke about the importance of questioning, said Eloise Wessels, head of NB Publishers.

“That is how he lived and that same search underpinned all his writing,” Wessels said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.

Brink made his debut in 1962, and soon became part of a literary movement, along with poet Ingrid Jonker and fellow author Breyten Breytenbach, who used the Afrikaans language to oppose the apartheid regime.

His 1975 book, Looking on Darkness, the first of Brink’s books distributed to the United States, was banned by the South African government until 1982. Brink wrote his novels in English and Afrikaans, in an attempt to buck censorship.

Internationally, Brink was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature several times, according to NB publishers. Brink was twice shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker prize, in 1976 for his book An Instant in the Wind, and again for his 1978 novel Rumours of Rain. In 2012, he was longlisted for the novel Philida, his last.

His novel, A Dry White Season, was turned into a 1989 film, starring Donald Sutherland, Susan Sarandon and Marlon Brando, who earned a nomination for an Academy Award for an actor in a supporting role.

Brink was born May 29, 1935 in the town of Vrede, in the central Free State province in South Africa. He was a playwright, literary critic, translator and academic, and wrote more than 25 novels and over a dozen plays, according to the publishers.

Brink is survived by his wife Karina, four children, and six grandchildren. He was working on another novel at the time of his death, said Wessels.

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Author News:

>>>THE WORDSMITH

Getting to know…Roland Watson-Grant [pics:Cut out pic of Roland with books]

The recently wrapped Kingston Book Fair saw emerging Jamaican author Roland Watson-Grant continuing to stake his claim on Caribbean literary turf. His reading at Love Affair With Literature 4, the fair’s kick-off event on March 1 at the University of the West Indies, had his audience bewitched by not only the sheer power of his prose, but also the efficacy of his sure-footed delivery. Watson-Grant, whose background is in advertising, has the smooth and soothing reading voice associated with voiceover talent and an affinity for spinning a mesmerising tale. He delighted the audience with a humorous, pitch-perfect excerpt about prayer warriors from Skid, his sophomore novel (after 2013’s well-regarded Sketcher), and a moving extract from a short story called Cursing Mrs Murphy (set to appear in a major literary journal later this year), about the psychological effects a woman must grapple with in the wake of her mother’s suicide at Flat Bridge, years prior, in a vehicle with her children aboard.

Watson-Grant has a growing fan base, both locally and internationally. Indeed, his debut novel Sketcher has been racking up favourable reviews since its release, including notices from the London Times, The Bookseller in the UK and tripfiction.com and finding itself on GQ Australia’s best summer fiction 2013 list; it’s already even been translated into Turkish and Spanish and an audio book from audible.com is presently available. With New Zealand’s Yorkshire Gazette declaring him “an author to watch”, and Emre Erdur of Geoturka Publishing in Turkey predicting that “he will be a worldwide author”, Roland Watson-Grant certainly seems poised to write his name into the canon of great Caribbean literature. No empty words here: things are in train for this to happen. His follow-up novel, Skid, has been recently released, and the final, yet-to-be-titled instalment of the Beaumont trilogy is scheduled for spring of 2016. Watson-Grant is, believe it or not, already at work on his fourth book.

Not bad for a young writer who eschewed the current de rigueur trend of completing MFA writing programmes as a route to publishing. In fact, his journey to literary success started very quietly.

The affable Watson-Grant, a KC past student and English major from the University of the West Indies, knew he would become a writer from the time he was 10. He was raised, along with three bothers and a sister, by a single mother during the politically charged period of the 1980s after his parents’ relationship broke up. His mother, whom he counts as his number one fan, nurtured his love of reading. “She turned off the TV and said ‘Here are the books,'” Watson-Grant shared. When he was 13, he read Olive Senior’s story collection Summer Lightning, which made him realise that what he wanted to do with writing could actually be done. “She wrote about the beauty in broken things,” he noted. This was his ‘aha!’ moment.

After he graduated from KC he returned there to teach English at the age of 20, and it was his students who encouraged him to do a voiceover tape. Commercial writing soon came into the frame and thus was born his professional writing career. Around that time he read James McBride’s The Colour of Water. Watson-Grant, who had been tinkering around with a novel, was discouraged. “I put my book down,” he recalled. “Because I thought, This man has written my book. What’s the point of doing the same thing?”

A traumatic event in 2009 set him back on his journey, however. His beloved sister died, but before she did, she expressly encouraged him to pursue his passion. And in 2010, he said he began trolling the Internet for writing competitions. Then, as usually happens, his dedication and commitment paid off. He entered a short story into the Lightship International Literary Competition in 2011. Sketcher, the short story, ended becoming a runner-up selection from 10 international finalists. Watson-Grant ended up doing a reading of the work at the ceremony, a publisher heard him and was impressed, seeking him out at the end and informing him that he thought the story was the outline for a bigger novel, and that when he developed it he should give him a call. The upshot: Sketcher was born.

The rest, as they say, is literary history.

The story’s protagonist, the precocious Skid Beaumont, has been described as part Huck Finn, part-Bart Simpson. His is the compelling narrative voice that relates the story of the Beaumont family who move to the swamps of Louisiana because of a drunken vision by the patriarch that the Seventies oil boom would bring the city into the swamps. The dream, however, never becomes a reality, and Skid and his family find themselves stuck in the swamp, with their dreams slipping further and further away.

“There are so many parallels between New Orleans and Jamaica,” Watson-Grant explained about the choice of the Louisiana swamp for the novel’s atmospheric setting. “I wanted to look into the American Dream that doesn’t happen”, explore the brokenness that occurs “when we in the Caribbean go abroad and try to combine cultures”.

And it works. Roland Watson-Grant’s ambition, from all those years ago when he read Olive Senior’s seminal collection, has begun to take shape. In Skid Beaumont and his family, Watson-Grant makes something beautiful, warm and wonderful from something fractured.

His books are available online and at Bookophilia, Kingston Bookshop, Bookland New Kingston and major pharmacies in Jamaica.

>>>NEW IN BOOKS

Red Jacket by Pam Mordecai (Dundurn)

Bookends is excited to see that Jamaican scholar Pam Mordecai is once again in fiction mode after her well-received 2007 short-story collection Pink Icing and Other Stories. The renowned poet, who has several poetry collections under her belt (her last collection of verse Subversive Sonnets was published in 2012), has most recently published Red Jacket, a novel set in the Caribbean and Canada, where the author currently lives.

Growing up as part of a large loving family on the Caribbean island of St Chris, Grace Carpenter never feels like she really belongs. Although her large, extended family is black, she is a ‘redibo’. Her skin is copper-coloured, her hair is red, and her eyes are grey. A neighbour taunts her, calling her “a little red jacket,” but the reason for the insult is never explained. Only much later does Grace learn the story of her birth mother and decipher the mystery surrounding her true identity.

The story has been described as a “compelling tale of faith and family, ranging from the dusty landscapes of West Africa to the rich flavours of the Caribbean”, one that richly tells about “the agony of being made to feel different and the elusiveness of belonging”.

Highly recommended.

>>>HOT PICK OF THE WEEK

Mrs B by Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw (Peepal Tree Press)

We’re excited at this latest from Walcott-Hackshaw, Caribbean laureate in Literature Derek Walcott’s progeny and accomplished academic (she has a PhD in French Literature and Language from Boston University) and writer in her own right (she has a story collection Four Taxis Facing North, in addition to other scholarly work). Mrs B was released at last year’s NGC Bocas Lit Fest in Trinidad and the feedback has been solid. We think it should be on Bookends readers’ must-read list.

Ruthie’s academic success has been her mother Mrs B’s pride and joy, but as the novel begins, she and her husband Charles are on their way to the airport to collect their daughter who has had a nervous breakdown after a scandal involving an affair with a married professor.

Loosely inspired by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Mrs B focuses on the life of an upper middle-class family in contemporary Trinidad, who has, in response to the island’s crime and violence, retreated to a gated community. Like Flaubert’s heroine Mrs B’s desires are often tied to the expectations of her social circle. Without ever losing sympathy for Mrs B and her family, the novel asks some tough questions about what resources Mrs B can bring to her “issues” and how she can find meaning in her life. And what of Ruthie? Can her greater openness to the island challenge her easy acceptance of privilege?

Available in print and e-book. Highly recommended.

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Bookends serial

The Wife [pic: wife]

18

That was the stagnant and sorry state of my life when Maxine told me about her plans to open a hair salon. I was feeling like a failure as a wife and mother and truthfully, I didn’t even have a job that excited me. I was what is these days called an executive assistant to the founding partner of an old law firm, but I had long lost the zest for what I did. True, I made a decent living and was able to get by on my salary and the child support Robert was paying for Evan, but I had to think long-term now. Lucia had suddenly started buckling down at school because she decided she wanted to go to college; in another two years she’d be finished with high school. I certainly couldn’t afford the tuition as things stood now.

She’d explained to me, in one of the rare moments she wasn’t snarling and rolling her eyes at me, that although some of her friends were thinking of going to school abroad, she’d be satisfied with attending the university here.

“Maybe I can live on campus,” she’d added, giving me a look that suggested that she was daring me to object.

It was on a school afternoon and we’d all miraculously executed the feat of dining together at the living room table. Robert had just dropped Evan home from school, which he did every school evening now. I remember flinching at how crushed Lucia had been when Robert had barely acknowledged her earlier as he dawdled in the doorway sadly watching her lay the table.

Now that he’d discovered she wasn’t his biological child it was as though a switch had tripped and practically overnight a wall had come between them. I couldn’t understand it. They’d been so close before. How could he not see her still as his daughter, the little girl he’d taken to Devon House for ice-cream treats, played tea party with, read bedtime stories to, and then the young adolescent he’d counselled about growing up and respecting her body?

He now barely even spoke to her.

After he’d left we’d all sat down to eat the meal both children loved more than any other, parmesan chicken and wild rice, which I’d prepared because I’d stayed home from work that day. There was no telling exactly how Lucia would lash out, and so I tried to keep the mood light, intuiting her pain, and had encouraged Evan to talk in his usual circuitous and dull way about his afternoon with his father, whom he believed to already be seeing a woman, Delia, from his church, a woman with whom I’d been friendly.

“Daddy said the next time I spend the weekend with him I can ask Shaq and Tristan to come too,” he announced in the same deadpan he’d affected while relating the events of the afternoon, which included helping his father oversee the installation of a new baptismal pool at the church which was being renovated. The divorce had been hard on him, too, and there was nothing I could do to assuage my guilt about how I’d wrecked all of our lives.

“Sure,” I said, anxious to appease. “I’ll call their moms and set it up for next weekend.”

Evan stopped chewing and looked up, a thoughtful expression on his face. “No, Mummy,” he said. “That’s OK. Auntie Delia asked me for their numbers and she’s going to call them.”

When Evan had initially told me about Delia, I’d dismissed it as a child’s overactive imagination at work. Not that my ex-husband couldn’t see any woman he wanted to! He was certainly entitled to. But somehow I’d always believed he wouldn’t, at least not so soon. He sure as hell was no saint – all those evenings in his study surfing the Internet for porn and masturbating while he sat there in front of his computer instead of preparing his sermons! I’d kept his proclivities to myself – I hadn’t even told Maxine – but somehow I’d never really been threatened by it. Truth is, Robert was one of those men who were better with virtual sex than the real thing. Meaning, for all his fetishes, when it came time to deliver, in bed, now I could finally admit this: he was nowhere near the man his father was. When I’d had the affair with Robert, Sr he hadn’t been my first. But he’d sure as hell been the best.

I couldn’t believe that Robert was thinking about another woman already. Was he sleeping with this whore, this Delia, a childless divorcee who, despite wearing too much make-up and certain sketchy articles of clothes, had seemed to me to be devoted to her God and her church, in that order.

Now I could only blink at my son in mute anger.

It was at this point Lucia, who’d been desultorily, nibbling at her food, and not participating in the conversation, seemed to zone in. She slid me what seemed to be a sympathetic look before quickly reaching over to touch my hand, then changing the subject.

Right then, I found myself falling in love with her again. Lucia, it was true, had become a veritable scowling, often downright nasty, stranger to me in these last two years but for a moment, her humanity had come out and she’d seen it fit to initiate a protective gesture for the woman who’d turned her safe world upside down.

“Tiffany and I are thinking of applying to UWI,” she shared, staring intently at me with her big expressive eyes filled with sympathy. “She’s going to try for Law. Or Social Sciences. Me, I don’t know quite what I’d do with a literature degree but I think that’s what I’m going to study.”

Once again, I was surprised by something one of my children had told me. Yes, she was settling down nicely at school these days – after a schoolmate had been stabbed when they were in grade nine, she’d turned to indiscriminate sex with boys and her grades had gone into the toilet. I knew for a fact about the boys because I’d discovered her performing oral sex on the stabbed classmate’s boyfriend one Sunday when I’d come home early from church and surprised her right there in the living room. I kept her secret, never told Robert, but I’d made her swear she wouldn’t do it again. She was still having sex though, I knew, because I snooped around in her dresser drawers and found condoms and other such paraphernalia. And only the night before, I’d paused at her door on my way to the kitchen, driven there by the usual insomnia, for a late-night snack, when I’d heard muffled sounds emanating from the bowels of her room, that childhood sanctuary still decorated in girlie-girl pink and whose walls were adorned with posters of her favourite celebrities. I hadn’t had sex in a while, but I still remembered what ecstasy sounded like. And that, most definitely, was it.

To be continued