2020 Frank Collymore Literary Award winner Linda M. Deane. Photo Copyright © 2021.
THE 23rd FRANK COLLYMORE LITERARY AWARDS were presented entirely virtually for the first time on February 14, 2021. Because of COVID-19 restrictions, the ceremony was aired via a live stream that used prerecorded readings by the winners in various locations across the island.
All of the winners were poets this year, with the Prime Minister’s Award going to a prose writer for a YA novel.
In an interview shown during the awards, top winner Linda M. Deane said her mother was the inspiration for the collection of poems she submitted, An Ocean Away: My Mother, Smiling: Tales of Migration and Memory.
“It is about my mother, and it’s about memory and about migration. It was inspired by her life, but only really started to come together as our family—my sister and myself and my father – had to come to grips with her Alzheimer’s. And I figured, you know, she’s been migrating all her life. She migrated to England back in the 50’s, and migrated from England to other parts of the world. We migrate in so many different ways, and it struck us that this illness of hers, which is so cruel, is yet another migration. And so the collection is a way to tie all these forms of migrating together.”
She also complimented the Collys on how they have helped to shape and strengthen Barbadian literature over the last twenty-odd years. “They force us…I’d say inspire us, but they also compel us, challenge writers, to step up their game,” she added. “I see the Frank Collymore Literary Awards as our literary Grammys or Oscars.”
Deane took home $10,000.00 for her top-place win. Carlyon Blackman and Jacinth Browne-Howard, who shared second place, each received $5,000.00 for their collections: All Oppression is Connected and The Mother Island, respectively.
Tameisha's Lesson, a work of speculative fiction about a young teenaged girl transported to mid-nineteenth century Barbados, earned Zoanne Evans the Prime Minister's Award.
To watch a reading from the winning book An Ocean Away, My Mother Smiling: Tales of Migration and Memory and an interview with the author Linda M. Deane, see here.
This year’s judges were De Carla Applewhaite, Ayesha Gibson-Gill, Dana Gilkes, Dr Nicola Hunte, Dr Philip Nanton, Samuel Soyer, Andy Taitt, Dr Yvonne Weekes, and Esther Phillips.
Here’s what the judges had to say collectively about the manuscripts they considered for Barbados' most lucrative literary prize for unpublished work.
Frank Collymore Literary Award, First Prize: An Ocean Away: My Mother, Smiling: Tales of Migration and Memory by Linda M. Deane
A collection of poems guided by tropes of home and journey, An Ocean Away delivers in intimate tone a narrative of connections, strength and love that bind a line of women in a diasporic family. The emotional and thematic touchstones of the collection—memory, longing, filial ties—are conveyed in the defining imagery as well as the structure of the work. The significance of far-reaching connections is mirrored in the relationship forged between verse and prose in its delivery. Alongside the sometimes alliteratively rhythmic, sometimes visually shifting lines are narrative moments—vignettes of memory—that come into dialogue with the poignant emotional strokes captured by the poems.
In its treatment of points along a journey as locations as well as moments in time, An Ocean Away is divided into sections evocative of grounding experiences that knit together a family from Barbados to Manchester and back. Transitioning from “wild Westbury roadside storytellers” to “a Sister Anansi weaving new designs” in a cold climate, the collection primarily draws on the imagery of strong women to intertwine the threads of memory and belonging. One of its deft gestures links flora, naming and adventurous women to express belonging amid change and crisis. Conveyed as the movement between “tricky spaces” created by recollection, language and longing, its free verse and narrative effect time-jumps between the past and present, between Bim and points on the globe.
The flexibility of this collection is evinced in its ability to juxtapose the timeliness of present-day Barbados “on lockdown” with the timeless struggle against memory loss and with confronting human frailty. In each instalment of this work, the moments are handled with thoughtful reverence, gratitude and tenderness. Please see here for a selection of poems from the collection.
Frank Collymore Literary Award, Joint Second Prize: The Mother Island by Jacinth Browne-Howard
The Mother Island is a collection of several voices delivering individual musings on diverse concerns, ranging from the beautiful power of the elements to the weighty significance of daily chores. Characterized by confident introspection, each poem is a carefully self-contained snapshot of experience. The overall body is divided into sections that point to a central image, or offer several concerns in dialogue with each other, that manage to bring together the different personas. The section entitled “Wenchcraft,” for example, develops around a preoccupation with honing the writer’s craft alongside the demands of motherhood, and “Paradise” offers an insider’s perspective of island life interspersed with notions of journeying.
The overarching feel of the collection suggests an attentiveness to poetic form and convention, with sometimes a direct, other times subtle nod to literary precursors. As a result, there is a range of free verse and structured-rhyme formats that are careful to link content with style in a manner reminiscent of established poetic works. An effect of such thoughtful construction is that the standard appearance of the lines on the page belie the sophisticated efforts with word choice, register and figurative expressions in these poems. This collection is devoted to neat imagistic development, extended metaphor and pert cross-cultural allusions geared toward producing experiential slices. From the first poem to the last, the collection builds a varied corpus of experience rooted in the Caribbean that reaches across cultural as well as emotional borders.
Frank Collymore Literary Award, Joint Second Prize: All Oppression is Connected by Carlyon Blackman
“Daring,” “sophisticated,” “cerebral,” “provocative” are the words that come to mind to describe All Oppression is Connected. The emotional force that repeats in each poem is the central organizing principle of this collection. Whether in formal English or nation language, each piece evokes a clear, resonant voice that intones simultaneously complex, layered thoughts and feelings. There is a particular sharpness to these poems’ imagistic wit reminiscent of metaphysical conceits—the linking of a physical object to a spiritual concern in a way that governs the structure of the poem. This careful, intellectual construction, however, is not at odds with the personal, sometimes naked tone of several of these works. There is a consistent return to looking at everyday objects in a way that leads to the consideration of intricate, multi-faceted conflict and epiphany. There are often detailed, idiosyncratic touches of daily life that though not idealized still communicate joy and dedication. Alongside these moments are those of loneliness, anger, insecurity, but so touchingly evoked through the persona’s conspiratorial intimacy that there is a willingness to share in these difficult experiences. With its passionate, visceral imagery, these poems capture raw emotion and hard-edged contemplations with confidence and deftness. The core of this work is its mature emotional exploration and finely wrought images for the eye as well as the ear. The overall effect is that even as these works present some of the rough edges of human experience that hit uncomfortably below the skin, they leave behind a blossoming feeling of warmth and closeness.
Frank Collymore Literary Award, Prime Minister’s Award: Temeisha’s Lesson by Zoanne Evans (Although no formal citation was prepared, the following is a summary of the novel, which was considered “the most outstanding” entry in this category.)
Tameisha’s Lesson is about the feisty fourteen-year-old Tameisha Rouse, who hates school and dreams of plaiting hair for a living. Growing up in the Pine housing area in Barbados and attending Parkinson Memorial School, she cannot see the possibilities that her free education affords her, nor does she realize how privileged she is to live in a country that offers a free health care system and equal rights for all. However, all that changes when a pretty cosmetologist visits her school and gets her to thinking about being businesslike and professional. Intrigued by the lady’s address to the students, Tameisha goes to the school library to research Madame C.J. Walker, one of the famous black businesswomen mentioned by the speaker. While browsing through a history book, she falls asleep in the library and wakes up on Pine Plantation in recently emancipated Barbados of 1840, where she meets a young former slave girl by the name of Roxanna. Roxanna longs to go to school and to learn to read and write. Roxanna’s plight, and that of the many black people she sees toiling on the plantation all day long, set Tameisha to wondering if she has been wasting her time at school. In the adventures that follow, she learns a great deal about some of her island’s national heroes and about the hard-fought battles that afforded her the liberties and luxuries she had hitherto taken completely for granted.
For more on the 2020 Collys, please see the Barbados Advocate's coverage, “Deane takes top literary prize worth $10 000” in Barbados Today, and this Central Bank of Barbados news item.
Last Modified: April 27, 2022.
