To speak to her, you would have no inkling that Barbara Jenkins is shaping up to be one of the Caribbean’s well-celebrated voices.

Archipelago, a novel by Trinidadian writer Monique Roffey, sailed away with the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

And then there were six... The list of emerging writers vying for the inaugural Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize has been further narrowed to six candidates hailing from Trinidad and Tobago, Bermuda and the Bahamas.

Four Caribbean writers have been shortlisted for the 2013 Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize. The regional finalists for the prestigious literary competition hail from Trinidad and Tobago and The Bahamas. Interestingly, this year’s shortlist has been dominated by female writers.

The 2013 staging of the Bocas Literary Festival, Port of Spain, Trinidad will shine much of its literary light on emerging writers. Chief among these will be the announcement of the inaugural Hollick-Arvon Prize (HAP) for Emerging Writers.

The fourteen finalists in the inaugural Hollick-Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize have been announced.

Joanne C. Hillhouse is an Antiguan writer. Her novel Oh Gad! is a Zane Presents work, published by Strebor Books. She is the author of The Boy From Willow Bend and Dancing Nude in the Moonlight.

The OCM Bocas Literary Festival has announced its longlist for the Bocas 2013 prize. The longlist features ten writers from six Caribbean countries across the competition’s three genre’s poetry, fiction and literary non-fiction.

“I thought I would be able to affect a reclusive mysteriousness. People would ask me for interviews and I’d decline them,” Diana McCaulay told the small audience gathered to hear her read from her novel Huracan, at Redbones the Blues Cafe, recently.

Jamaican novelist, poet and political activist Claude McKay got an expected birthday present this year as a previously unpublished manuscript was found and authenticated by two scholars, Columbia graduate student Jean-Christophe Cloutier and his advisor, Brent Hayes Edwards.