For the second time in the 14-year history of the prize, a non-fiction book has won the overall award. Jamaican author Safiya Sinclair’s book, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir, has emerged as the overall 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, which comes with a cash award of US$10,000, sponsored by One Caribbean Media.

Speaking at the award ceremony on Saturday, April 27, at Esperenza Alta, St Ann’s, in Trinidad, Sinclair said she wrote the book for Caribbean women. As reported in Trinidad & Tobago’s Newsday, Sinclair said, “Everything I write and feel and dream is for the Caribbean. I wrote How to Say Babylon for all the Caribbean women whose work and deeds so often go unseen and unsung, women who are overlooked and forgotten in the margins of history. I wrote this book for all the Caribbean who gave us the wildfire of our dialects and our folklore.”

Sinclair also expressed that she wrote the memoir, which was selected as the October 2023 Read With Jenna Book Club pick on Today.com, “for Montego Bay, Jamaica, the red poinciana I was born under, the blue sound and music of my Caribbean Sea”.

Sinclair, already an award-winning poet (her debut book Cannibal was the winner of the 2016 Whiting Award and the winner of the 2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature – Poetry, among other plaudits), teaches creative writing at Arizona State University. Her memoir documents growing up poor in a family headed by her father, a reggae musician and militant acolyte of a Rastafari sect, who saw Sinclair’s mother, her sisters, and herself, as subservient. The book chronicles her eventual estrangement from her father and the interrogation of all the tenets of her fundamentalist upbringing, leading to escaping her father’s tyrannical hold and the cutting of her dreadlocks, finding her voice along the way as a liberated woman.

This year’s OCM Bocas Prize for Literature shortlist consisted of Trinidadian Kevin Jared Hosein, who won the fiction category with his book Hungry Ghosts, and Nicole Sealey, of St Thomas, US Virgin Islands, who won the poetry prize for The Ferguson Report: An Erasure.

Acclaimed Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat was chief judge, aided by St Lucian poet Canisia Lubrin, Trinidadian-born novelist Rabindranath Maharaj and Guyanese-born academic D Alissa Trotz.

In their formal citation, the judges said How to Say Babylon “is a memoir that reminds us of the expansive possibilities of creative non-fiction, bringing to the fore, with unforgettable poetic verve, a voice that is fierce, courageous, deeply intelligent, and empathetic, its nerve endings vibrating out from a specific experience of Rastafarianism into the currents of the wider world.

“Embodying the finest traditions within Caribbean writing, yet standing on its own as a unique and astonishing work of witness, this is a work of reparation attending to both uneasy colonial legacies and difficult contemporary departures.”