Canada-based Vincentian poet shortlisted for top Caribbean Literary Award

The recent announcement that a Vincentian poet, Linzey Corridon, has earned a spot among 15 shortlistees in the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature is creating a buzz in the local writing community.

The Prize is judged across three categories- fiction, non-fiction and poetry, and is considered to be one of the most prestigious book awards for regional writing. Corridon’s debut poetry collection, West of West Indian, has made history as the first Vincentian offering to be shortlisted for the Prize since it was inaugurated in 2011.

Corridon is going up against four works: ‘Polkadot Wounds’ by Trinidadian-Scottish Anthony Vahni Capildeo; ‘Some of Us Can Go Back Home’ by Jamaican Yashika Graham; ‘Getting Through: New and Selected Poems’ by US-based Trinidadian Mervyn Taylor; ‘Coco Island’, by UK-based Jamaican poet Christine Roseeta Walker, with the winner of this and the other two categories to be announced on April 6, 2025.

In the collection, Linzey,who resides in Canada, tackles the taboo topic of queerness, from both an individual and collective perspective as he details “the tragedy of the Caribbean queer”. The work is not one that focuses solely on painful experiences, as Corridon noted in his interview with SEARCHLIGHT.

“… even in ugliness, there are moments of beauty, moments of respite.”

He disclosed that he left St Vincent and the Grenadines as a teen carrying a host of “unresolved feelings” about his experiences with Vincentians’ non- accepting nature of queerness.

“Part of writing this book meant sitting down and trying to think through some of the ways in which I have learnt to recognize traces of love in those past experiences I erroneously believed were definitively ugly times. The truth is that no one person, no one event is simply ugly and nothing more.”

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