Locally-based writers dominated Guyana Prize for Literature
-manuscript won major award for the first time
All the processes and events connected to the Guyana Prize for Literature 2023 concluded on May 3, when the curtains closed on the 2024 Literary Festival. There were multiple sessions of performance, exhibitions, discussions and readings, but the main event was the Awards Presentation Ceremony at which the Prime Minister Hon. Mark Phillips, standing in for the President, handed out the awards to the Prize Winners in Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Non-Fiction and the Youth Awards.
In significant contrast to previous trends, locally resident writers dominated the awards. Of the six major Prizes, only two went to overseas based writers – the Guyana Prize for Drama and the Prize for the Best First Book of Poetry (the Youth awards are only available to local residents). Most of the second and third place winners are overseas.
Two writers in 2023 were first time winners (Fiction and Non-Fiction), while in Poetry and Drama the winners have had multiple awards. One of the Youth winners also had a prize last year.
FICTION
Winner of the 2023 Guyana Prize for Fiction was Michael Jordan for his second novel The Girl in the Pink Pleated Skirt. For the first time in the history of the Prize a manuscript was winning a major award. Jordan is well known in Guyana as a journalist, whose first novel, Kamarang (2022) was shortlisted in 2022. This was also the first time a popular genre novel – crime fiction – was winning the Prize. The Jury Chairman, Funso Aiyejina, explained that Jordan’s victory was emphatic – his novel, despite its own limitations, was far superior to all others in the field, which trailed considerably behind it. Below is the Jury’s citation.
The Girl in the Pink Pleated Skirt by Michael Jordan
The first-person narrator of this novel is emotionally and mentally invested. He combines the art of investigative journalism with the skills of a passionate amateur detective to unravel the political and police corruption that had caused the official investigations of the horrific murders of young Guyanese girls to go cold. In having the courage and folly to follow the clues to their logical conclusion, the narrator fulfils his life-long promise to unmask the identity of the person behind the dastardly murder of the girl in the pink pleated skirt. The writing is confident, the dialogue is appropriately modulated to convey Guyanese urban culture, and the characters, both the incidental and central, come alive in the orchestrating hand of Michael Jordan.
Third Place :
NON – FICTION
The 2023 Guyana Prize for Non-Fiction was awarded to Dr Estherine G. H. Adams for her historical work The Few Among the Many: Women’s Labour in British Guiana’s Jails, 1838-1917 , 2023. Dr. Adams is a historian and Head of the Department of History and Caribbean Studies at the University of Guyana. This is her first full-length work, based on research conducted over a number of years at UG and in collaboration with others, including Dr Mellissa Ifill, Deputy ViceChancellor at UG. Chairman of the Jury Edward Greene had this to say in the Jury’s citation.
The core argument of Estherine Adams’ book is that the prison in British Guiana in the period after Emancipation in 1838 was fundamentally a tool for controlling the labour of the non-white population of the colony. She writes that “the local government and the plantocracy leveraged the expansion of the colony’s prisons not to control crime, per se, but to control labour.” Both freed Africans and indentured labourers were subject to the whims of magistrates who were ready to convict and collaborate with the plantocracy in order to create a prison population to serve as a source of unpaid and enforced labour. Adams shows that women inmates were significant contributors to the plantation economy in this way, though their forced work has been almost completely unrecorded by modern historians. Adams’ research is comprehensive and her book will be the main text on the subject of the incarceration of women in British Guiana, essential to all future researchers. It is both original and meticulously documented.
Second Place: Baytoram Ramharack, A Powerful Indian Voice: Alice Bhagwandai Singh, Reflections on her Work in Guyana, 2023
Third Place: Joanne Collins-Gonsalves, Iris De Freitas Brazao: Legal Luminary and Trailblazer, Publishing Inc. Alberta, Canada, 2023.
Nesha Z. Haniff, The Pedagogy of Action: Small Axe Fall Big Tree , Pelgrave McMillan Books, Singapore, 2022
POETRY
The Guyana Prize for Poetry 2023 was awarded to Ian McDonald for his collection Not Quite Without A Moon, Peepal Tree Press, 2023. McDonald, who has won this Prize more than once is an exceptionally prolific writer of poetry and non-fiction, has published several collections of poetry and received the third place in Non-Fiction in the Guyana Prize last year. Below is the citation released by the Poetry Jury Chairman Evelyn O’Callaghan.
Another late work by a poet still on top of his craft. The collection is moving and varied, a strong and well-rendered selection of writing. The poems are exquisite and poignant – piercing through time to cherished memories of his childhood and strong sense of belonging to Guyana (“Place of worship”, “Forest at Night”). There is something wondrous in the way McDonald manages to mine the mundane, the everyday and find glory in it.
Some of the simple portraits of ordinary Guyanese men and women (cricket fans and their commentaries, “Mrs Mathews” and her love of poetry, sugar workers in a rumshop discussing what they will use their bonuses to buy) evoke deep emotion in the reader, as do the matterof-fact thoughts on aging and the defiant assertion of joy,