2022 Frank Collymore Literary Award winner Peter Laurie. Photo Copyright © 2023 by Peter Laurie.
Adapted from centralbank.org.bb. Peter Laurie Took Home the $10,000 First Prize at the 25th FCLE Awards
PETER LAURIE TOOK TOP HONOURS at the 25th Frank Collymore Literary Endowment awards ceremony, which was held on Saturday, January 28. His The House that Disappeared emerged as the best among a field of sixty-four, and netted him the $10,000 first prize.
The $7 500 second prize went to Ark Ramsay for his My Warming Body, a work of non-fiction, and there was a tie for third place, with Kerry Andre Belgrave for you… and Martin Boyce for In the Secret Places, each taking home $3 000. Boyce also won the Prime Minister's Award, which is sponsored by the Ministry of Culture.
Denis Foster received a special award, and Lisa Fraser, Mercedes Knight, Gloria Eastmond, and Akheem Chandler-Prescod all received honourable mentions.
The awards ceremony, which was held at the Frank Collymore Hall, included readings from the finalists' works and a feature address by Barbadian novelist Wayne Jordan.
In his opening remarks at the event, Central Bank of Barbados Deputy Governor Alwyn Jordan said that since getting its start as an activity to mark the bank's silver anniversary, the FCLE had developed a legacy of its own, noting that “as it marks its own milestone anniversary, it has become a symbol of excellence” for those involved in the literary arts in Barbados. He encouraged the winners and other entrants to help maintain that legacy, and the audience to continue to support them in doing so.
The Frank Collymore Literary Endowment is part of the Central Bank of Barbados' cultural outreach. The bank is also a long-running sponsor of the Crop Over Visual Arts Festival, and owns the Exchange Interactive Centre, a museum located next to the bank's Spry Street headquarters.
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This year’s judges were De Carla Applewhaite, Andrew Armstrong, Ayesha Gibson-Gill, Dana Gilkes, Dr Nicola Hunte, Dr Philip Nanton, Karra Price, Samuel Soyer, Andy Taitt, and Dr Yvonne Weekes. Here’s what the judges had to say collectively about the manuscripts they considered for Barbados’ most lucrative literary prize for unpublished work, and a few words from the top-place winner on the experience of entering.
Frank Collymore Literary Award, First Prize: The House that Disappeared by Peter Laurie
A deceptively simple tale of Mr Smith and Ms Jones, whose neighbours include Mr Brown, Ms Black and Ms White. And Dr Mauve. This dystopian novella, kept to a minimum, with spare language and minimal distraction from description, looks at who we love and why and how, who loves us, growing old, understanding the importance of people and things around us, and ultimately why we live.
“I have made many submissions to the FCLE competition over the decades. Apart from an honourable mention a decade ago, this is the first time I won a prize. So I would encourage all writers, especially the young, to keep on submitting and not give up. If a seventy-nine-year-old man can win the first prize, no one should consider age a deterrent.
“I have no idea why this novella won any prize, far less the first prize. I was blindsided. Someday I hope someone will explain. Admittedly, it was the first time I had written a dystopian story set in an alternate reality.
“I write because I enjoy it. It's a passion. Winning prizes and being published are nice but inconsequential.
“Reading is the key to writing. So, read. Read anything. Read indiscriminately. Just read.” Peter Laurie, June 2023. Please see here for an excerpt from the novella.
Frank Collymore Literary Award, Second Prize: My Warming Body: Essays and Explorations by Ark Ramsay
With the emotional intensity and focus of lyric poetry, My Warming Body: Essays and Explorations weaves together perspectives on identity, migration and mental health that offer a contemporary edginess to these enduring concerns. Told from a first-person perspective with the raw vulnerability of a confidant, this narrative follows the central character’s emotional as well as physical journey in search of a place to belong.
The appeal of this dual-layered quest lies with its measured movement between vulnerability and triumph, through pain and tenderness, as the character navigates the exploration of gender identity alongside the experiences of depression and the hidden stories of family ties. The balance struck between the large interlocking features of this personal journey—with a sense of feeling “out-of-place” with each of these steps toward self-awareness—is achieved clearly with the narrative structure. What unfolds as part medication journal, visa application, confessional, hallucinatory dream, and family history effectively pulls together pieces of personal epiphanies and losses through the unifying voice of a curious, self-reflective storyteller. The resulting tapestry is enhanced by the reliance on visual and tactile imagery so that the reader may share the same spaces and sensations with the central character in the quest for love, warmth, security, in the journey toward home.
Frank Collymore Literary Award, Joint Third Prize: you… by Kerry Belgrave and In the Secret Places by Martin Boyce
you… is a collection of poetry that looks frankly at us. The poems veer between lyrical older voices grounded in the morality and tone of the King James version of the Bible and “the young people nowadays,” honing their thought processes into social media speak—a long way from the tone of King James while still firmly grounded in its morality. We meet in these poems the people of no value, people who have been discarded but who insist on their inherent value. They are restored in these poems that find their best qualities hidden under the things they must do to survive, and impart them with a minor grandeur through the quality of the language.
There is a cruel beauty to In the Secret Places. This entry also won the Prime Minister’s Award (see below) for its foray into queer life in Barbados. Showing the ordinariness of such life, In the Secret Places is a painful story about the near loss of a sister with developmental difficulties, a mother distraught beyond caring about her appearance, and the relief of a return to a normal disorder. There is simplicity of language and style that sits well with the emotional honesty of the work, with enough gallows humour to hint at the pain and the beauty.
Frank Collymore Literary Award, Prime Minister’s Award: In the Secret Places by Martin Boyce
This award goes to books that ask us to see Barbados in new ways, in ways that we may not be familiar with and that shift our view of what it means to be Barbadian. This collection of stories looks at the lives of queer men: the small everyday adjustments they often need to make; the constant calculations of the possibilities of violence, the “boom bye bye,” from men protecting a public image; the ways in which the chance to enjoy supposedly commonplace actions and emotions become small victories.
Written with humour—even if the humour is sometimes bleak, and with a sense of bitterness that is all the more effective for avoiding self-pity and despair—these are the stories of more Barbadians than our public image might imply.
Frank Collymore Literary Award, Special Award: Walking Blues and A Wilderness of Monkeys by Denis Foster
This special prize is awarded to Walking Blues and A Wilderness of Monkeys. Both collections are characterized by a mature perspective of diverse aspects of life rendered in image-rich, sensuous, and allusive language. Beauty, love, death, and the threat nature faces from human irresponsibility all engage the poet’s interest and artistry.
Most of all, this prize is for the Western-style haiku of Walking Blues, which enrich the spectrum of Barbadian/Caribbean writing with laudable examples of a genre that is little represented. It is a rare haiku collection in which each makes sense and presents something meaningful.
