The judges for the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature have announced the winners of the three genre categories:

Poetry winner
Polkadot Wounds, by Anthony Vahni Capildeo (Carcanet)

Fiction winner
Village Weavers, by Miriam JA Chancy (Tin House)

Non-fiction winner
Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, by Dionne Brand (Knopf Canada/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

These three books by already celebrated authors from Trinidad and Tobago and Haiti now form the final shortlist for the overall prize, which will be announced on Saturday, May 3 during the 2025 Bocas Lit Fest, now in its 15th year. The 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature is sponsored by One Caribbean Media, owner of the Trinidad and Tobago Express newspaper, TV6, and the OCM radio network.

Poetry
Polkadot Wounds, the ninth full-length book by Trinidadian-Scottish Anthony Vahni Capildeo, is the winner of the poetry category. Partly inspired by a residency in Cornwall, these poems wrestle equally with nature and landscape, concealed or forgotten histories, and tensions between community and “loss and longing”.
Polkadot Wounds, write the prize judges, “transforms form. Here the cemetery is a sanctuary is a playground is a coastal retreat. Capildeo’s facility with form lets them play in language in a way that makes new spaces for our imaginations. These poems make it seem like an easy feat to hold millennia in one image and then another, moving inside of time with grace … It is in fact a miracle only made possible by bringing a depth of precision and an openness of sound together again and again until resonance and surprise reveal their kinship.” Capildeo is a past winner of the Forward Prize for Poetry, in 2016, and was recently announced the winner of a 2025 Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Anguillan-American author and also winner of a Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry, chaired the poetry panel, joined by Canadian-British poet Alycia Pirmohamed, and Venezuelan poet and translator Adalber Salas Hernández.

Fiction
In the fiction category of the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize, the winner is the novel Village Weavers, by Haitian-Canadian-American Myriam J.A. Chancy. “The novel tells the story of a fractured and fractious friendship between two girls growing up in Haiti in the 1940s. Though from very different class backgrounds, the girls are drawn irresistibly to each other as kindred spirits, until a family secret is aired and their friendship is abruptly ended,” in the judges’s description.
“Chancy does not overplay the drama, quietly demonstrating how the ramifications of the rupture permeate the girls’ lives into their old age … The novel shifts across locations in Haiti, France, the Dominican Republic, and the United States with remarkable fluency and, with similar poise, covers several decades from 1941 to 2003. Chancy is a compelling story-teller, deftly keeping the focus on her key characters while also indicating the complex political contexts in which they live … All these factors make Village Weavers a compellingly ambitious and beautifully executed narrative.”
Chancy is the past winner of a Guyana Prize in Literature Caribbean Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
The fiction panel was chaired by Guyanese-British literary scholar Denise deCaires Narain, Emeritus Reader in Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Sussex, joined by T&T writer Celeste Mohammed (herself the winner of the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize) and Trinidadian-British Fleur Sinclair, president of the UK Booksellers Association.

Non-fiction
The third winner, in the nonfiction category, is Salvage: Readings from the Wreck by Trinidadian-Canadian Dionne Brand — who previously won the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize for Fiction with her novel Theory. Salvage is a series of essays bringing together literary criticism and autobiography, interrogating key works of the Western literary canon and their colonial and racist tropes. According to the judges, Salvage “profoundly, beautifully, and deftly changes how we read and see.”
The judges continue: “The many levels of writing in Salvage work to rethink the novel not just as content and representation but as the specific engine of a certain kind of worldly knowing. In Brand’s hands, the novel as a product and as a mode of conquest is exposed as part and parcel of a networked system of subjugations and subordinations. Brand’s beautifully crafted work, with its intelligent insights, precise re-readings and brilliant seeing gives readers another account of the experience of reading the shadows of the celebrated literary works she unpacks.”
Brand is another past winner of a Windham-Campbell Prize, and her other honours include Canada’s Governor-General’s Award for Poetry and the Griffin Poetry Prize.
The chair of the non-fiction panel, Barbados-born scholar Rinaldo Walcott, is Professor and Carl V. Granger Chair in Africana and American Studies at the University of Buffalo. He is joined by Gabrielle Hosein, Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, UWI, St. Augustine, and Dominica-born writer, curator, and artist Catherine Lord.
The three chairs of the genre panels now make up the final jury, joined by chief judge Erna Brodber, the celebrated Jamaican author whose many honours include a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, a Musgrave Gold Medal from the Institute of Jamaica, and a Prince Claus Award.
The overall winner of the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize, chosen from the three genre winners and awarded US$10,000, will be announced on Saturday, May 3 during the 2025 Bocas Lit Fest. The other category winners will each receive US$3,000.
The festival will run from Thursday, May 1 to Sunday, May 4, 2025 at the National Library and Old Fire Station and other venues around Port of Spain.