BRIDGETOWN – Dr Mark McWatt, a distinguished professor of West Indian literature and head of the Department of Language and Literature at the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies, has won two literary prizes for his first novel, Suspended Sentences – Fictions of Atonement.

Published last year in the United Kingdom, the novel won the 2006 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the best “First Book in the Caribbean/Canada Region” and later topped the 2006 competition of the ‘Casa de las Americas’, publishing house of Cuba, having competed with 17 other works. The latter prize was won in the ‘Caribbean Literature Section in English or Creole’ category.

McWatt is expected to travel to Melbourne, Australia next month to enter the final stage of the 20th Commonwealth Writers’ Prize competition – the international award for outstanding fiction.

Competitors will include writers from Africa, Eurasia, South-East Asia and the Pacific. The author of the overall best book will receive £10,000 while the author of the best first book will take home £3,000.

McWatt’s Suspended Sentences tells of an experience that dates back to 1966 when a group of sixth formers were “sentenced” by their school to write a short story that reflects their newly independent country, Guyana – the author’s native land.

Years later, as the story goes, McWatt, one of the group of students, is handed the papers of his old school friend, Victor Nunes, who has disappeared, feared drowned in Guyana’s vast interior region.

As a tribute to Victor, McWatt decides to collect from the other friends, the rest of the stories they were “sentenced” to write. This forms the basis of Suspended Sentences.

The jurors for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize described McWatt’s book as a first novel that refracts light like a powerful and many-faceted diamond.

“Its characters circle multiple challenges as they struggle to throw off the yoke of colonialism in Guyana. This is a wonderfully sophisticated threading of voices and variety…,” the jurors wrote.

For the Casa prize, the judges said, “The book is distinguished by the originality and inventiveness of the literary ploy on which this anthology is based, of stories by supposedly real authors. The interplay between the magic and the real dismantles the frontiers between both”.