One of the major events on the local cultural calendar is the Guyana Prize Literary Festival which takes place next weekend from February 10 to 12. The most important item in that timetable is the Awards Ceremony for the Guyana Prize for Literature slated for the evening of February 10 at the National Cultural Centre. It will be followed by a star-studded weekend of literary and dramatic presentations including from some leading Caribbean writers and literary/cultural personalities. This festival has been placed in the season of Mashramani to enhance and vary the entertainment as well as to lend considerable intellectual depth to the celebration of the nation of Guyana as a republic.
The Guyana Prize for Literature was re-established in 2022 after it had been discontinued by the government at the time in 2016. In the new dispensation it is not surprising that there are changes; some progressive, some to suit the style of the new government, and others that are neither welcome nor advisable. The prize and the festival that celebrates it now operate out of the strange new environment of a ministry instead of the university that housed it previously.
As we approach the three-day gala it must be remembered that the government is to be congratulated and given credit for reviving the Guyana Prize in the first place, although it would have been a great surprise if it had not. The Guyana Prize is too great and imperative an asset to be allowed to perish. The festival that has been built around it was first inaugurated in 2014, and is now renewed with increasing extensions.
The highlight of the first day is the awards ceremony. The juries have met and the shortlists have already been made public. On Friday, President Irfaan Ali will hand out the awards to the winners for Fiction, Poetry, Drama, First Book of Fiction, First Book of Poetry and Non-Fiction. There is also a Youth award, which was added in 2022. Non-Fiction has also been included for the first time after years of debate. There were five separate juries, one for each category, and the chairman for each will deliver Judges’ Reports.
During the day on Friday, Castellani House will host writers’ workshops and a session of story-telling. Because of the introduction of the Youth award, the first workshop will be for young writers, conducted by Professor Ian Robertson of UWI who chaired that jury, along with jury members Elfrieda Bissember and poet Jane King Hippolyte. The storytellers Michael Khan (Ole Man Pappie), Sonia Yarde, Keon Heywood and Natasha Azeez will perform to an audience expected to be largely drawn from secondary schools. Storytelling for another audience resumes on Sunday with a showcase of ethnic cultures – the Chinese through Adam Li of the Confucius Institute at University of Guyana and the Amerindian through Ovid Williams.
The engagement with youth continues on Saturday morning when those who won prizes will give public readings of their winning works in poetry and short story. Saturday also covers a wide range of interests. Workshops intensify with a session on the writing of poetry and another on the writing of drama.
Techniques in the crafting of poetry will be elucidated by international prize-winning poet and literary critic Prof Stephanos Stephanides, and literary and arts critic Prof Evelyn O’Callaghan, who chaired the Guyana Prize Jury for Poetry. Jury Chair for Drama Rawle Gibbons will lead the workshop on writing plays. He will be supported by Timmia Hearne of the USA, who was a member of the jury. Gibbons is among the foremost playwrights in the Caribbean, a leading director in the Trinidad theatre and a former head of department at UWI.
The other events on Saturday are all major features. The 2023 Martin Carter Distinguished Lecture is to be delivered by Prof O’Callaghan, a former dean at UWI in Barbados. She will analyse some aspects of the theme of madness in West Indian literature. Similar in magnitude on the programme is the eagerly anticipated public readings by the winners of the Guyana Prize, beginning at 6 pm.
Among the more popular features of the weekend is the finals of the National Poetry Slam 2023. This was another annual competition that ceased under the previous government. It comes under the portfolio of the National School of Theatre Arts and Drama and is coordinated by producer Franale Holder. With the revival of this thriller, 20 finalists emerged from among the several entrants of Spoken Word poets who will compete for the championships.
Workshops in the craft of writing will prove to be an important focus during the weekend. Sunday will see a masterclass in fiction writing and a masterclass in the writing of non-fiction. These will be led by craftsmen and critics of the highest order, all international personalities. The one on fiction will be conducted by Prof Funso Aiyejina, Emeritus Professor and former dean at UWI who is a Nigerian prose writer and a past winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa). He was also one of the directors of the Bocas Prize and literary festival in Trinidad and served as Chairman of the Jury for the Guyana Prize. He is to be supported in the workshop by Trinidadian winner of the Bocas Prize, fiction writer Celeste Mohammed, who was a member of the fiction jury.
The non-fiction writing masterclass is to be conducted by Professor David Dabydeen and Prof Edward Greene. Dabydeen is a novelist, poet and academic, formerly of the University of Warwick and currently a Fellow at Cambridge. Greene is the Chancellor of the University of Guyana, former academic at UWI and former assistant secretary general for the Directorate of Human and Social Development at the Caricom Secretariat. He has published some 10 books and was a member of the Guyana Prize Jury for Non-Fiction.
Another highly anticipated event is the public readings by Dabydeen, Mohammed, Aiyejina and Stephanides, who have all won international awards in fiction and poetry. Dabydeen is acclaimed in the UK and has also been awarded the Sabga Caribbean award for Excellence. Stephanides is a Greek Cypriot poet who has won poetry prizes, while both Aiyejina and Mohammed are fiction prize winners. It is a rare occasion that Guyanese audiences have the opportunity to hear the work of international authors and interact with them.
There will also be another public reading at which locally resident Guyanese writers will read from their work. Interestingly, although resident in Guyana, it is still rare for the local audience to hear them read their work. This is another benefit of the prize and its literary festival.
Yet another highlight is the Edgar Mittelholzer Memorial Lecture 2023, which will be delivered by Stephanides. He has served as professor at the University of Cyprus. And was a lecturer at the University of Guyana. He has conducted research in Kali Mai in Guyana. In the distinguished lecture he will focus on comparisons between Mediterranean literature and that of Guyana and the West Indies.
This festival cannot end on a higher note than the one scheduled for Sunday night at 8 pm at the National Cultural Centre. This will be the featured drama – a play that is one of the past winners of the Guyana Prize for Drama. Performance of such plays on stage is infrequent and this event is one attempt to change that. This will be the first in a series of productions of plays which have won the prize, but are rarely seen on stage.
The play for this Sunday is Sauda by Mosa Telford, which won the Guyana Prize in 2012. Fittingly, it was taken to Carifesta in 2015 where it was performed by the same group who will stage it on Sunday night – the National Drama Company (NDC). This NDC production is directed by Ayanna Waddell with Assistant Director Simone Dowding and Stage Manager Esther Hamer.
The roles are played by Tashandra Inniss in the lead as Sauda; Sonia Yarde supports her as Meri in the other major role. The supporting cast members are Mark Luke-Edwards as Esmond; Sheron Cadogan-Taylor as Dolores and LeTisha Da Silva as Rhonda. Deandra Daniels, Allia George, Keon Heywood and Jonathan Hamer play “the Shadows”; Kimberley Samuels is the musician and singer, joined in the music by Heywood, while Hamer is also the choreographer. Kimberly Fernandes is Props Manager, set design is by Waddell and Esther Hamer with Godfrey Naughton as set builder; Steve Douglas is make-up designer and Margaret Lawrence provides production assistance. For this production the NDC has co opted guest performers and practitioners Cadogan-Taylor, Dowding, Naughton, Douglas and Lawrence.
