Michael Jordan, Estherine Adams, Sameer Mohamed win at Guyana Prize for Literature 2023
The 2023 Guyana Prize for Literature awardees were last night announced at the 2024 festival, honouring outstanding works in fiction, poetry, drama, non-fiction, and youth categories.
In the fiction category, the top three winners were Kennard Ramphal for “Slippery Ochro” in 3rd place, Somnauth Narine for “Rage from the Backwaters” in 2nd place, and Michael Jordan for “Girl in the Pink Pleated Skirt” in 1st place.
In the Poetry category, Ruth Osman takes home the Best First Book of Poetry award for “All Made of Longing” while Ian McDonald won Best Overall Book of Poetry for “Not Quite Without a Moon.”
Sasenarine Persaud secured 3rd place with “Mattress Makers.”
For Drama, Harold Bascom’s “Unfounded” clinched 1st place, with Shaphan Hestick’s “With a Kiss” in 2nd place and Jamal La Rose’s “Requiem for the Living” in 3rd place.
In the Non-Fiction category, Estherine Adams wins 1st place for “The Few Among the Many: Women’s Labour in British Guiana’s Jails.” Baytoram Ramharack secured 2nd place with “A Powerful Indian Voice: Alice Bhagwandai Singh” and Nesha Haniff and Joanne Collins Gonsalves tied for 3rd place with “The Pedagogy of Action: Small Axe Fall
Big Tree” and “Iris De Freitas Brazao: Legal Luminary and Trailblazer” respectively.
Youth Awards were also presented, with Renika Anand winning 1st place in the Girls Poetry category for “Lotus Flower Story: The Woman” and Samir Mohamed earning 1st place in the Boys Short Story category for “The Lighthouse at the Bottom of the Sea.”
The event was marked by encouraging words from head Juror, Professor Evelyn O’Callaghan, who emphasized the importance of reading poetry and continuously improving writing techniques.
Jordan’s citation said: 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.
Adams’ citation said: 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 nonwhite 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.
Osman’s citation said: The title foregrounds the theme of longing, particularly for freedom to rise above conformity to the norm of “proper” female conduct, that runs like a thread through these poems. As noted in the Forward, this is a woman’s voice, a woman engaged with the lifelong project of making and remaking herself.
We also welcomed the wry self-reflective examination of the writing process, and noted the haunting presence of a Caribbean history of suffering and fire. Osman is comfortable with local language and imagery (“the light/sterile as a reptile’s stare” 19), and even in her darker poems is not averse to a witty lightness of touch. All in all, this is a collection of accomplished and elegant works in a strong and controlled poetic voice.
McDonald’s citation said: 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