Writing for Our Lives

Funso Aiyejina is a poet, short story writer, and playwright, born in Nigeria and living in Trinidad and Tobago. He is Professor Emeritus and former Dean of Humanities and Education at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine. His collection of short fiction, The Legend of the Rockhills and Other Stories, won the 2000 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Africa). He is a widely published critic on African and West African literature and culture, and deputy director of the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, Trinidad and Tobago’s annual literary festival.

Shivanee Ramlochan is a Trinidadian poet, essayist, and critic. Her collection of poems, Everyone Knows I am a Haunting (Peepal Tree Press) was shortlisted for the 2018 Felix Dennis Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her second poetry collection, Witch Hindu, and her debut creative non-fiction book of essays, Unkillable, which focuses on Indo-Caribbean women’s disobedience, are both in development.

Shivanee has served as Book Reviews Editor of Caribbean Beat Magazine since 2012. She has worked for the Bocas Lit Fest, the Caribbean’s largest Anglophone literary festival, since its inception, and currently serves as Festival and Programme Manager. Shivanee is Social Media and Events Manager for Paper Based Bookshop, Trinidad and Tobago’s sole Caribbean specialty bookseller. She was Chief Guest Editor for Susumba’s Book Bag Issue 10: Natural Disasters in Our Caribbean / Queer & LGBT Caribbean Lit, and has served on adjudication and editorial panels for Commonwealth Writers’ adda; Honeysuckle Press; The Forward Prizes; The Caribbean Review of Books, Discover T&T, and others. Currently, she serves as Translation Selector for the Poetry Book Society.

She is the Co-Editor, alongside Lucy Evans, of the forthcoming Peekash Press anthology, Unstitching Silence: Fiction and Poetry by Caribbean Writers on Gender-Based Violence (2024).  Shivanee is also a fellow of the Cropper Foundation Residential Writers’ Workshop in 2010.