A J The­o­lade

When the NGC Bo­cas Lit­er­ary Fes­ti­val start­ed four years ago, the small team of or­gan­is­ers, led by founder Ma­ri­na Sa­landy-Brown, knew that they "on­ly had one bite of the cher­ry at es­tab­lish­ing it." "No one knew what a lit­er­ary fes­ti­val was," says Sa­landy-Brown, "and we knew very well that if we didn't hit the ground run­ning, if we didn't show peo­ple what a lit­er­ary fes­ti­val was, that we would nev­er be able to es­tab­lish it."Start­ing out with less funds than need­ed but sure that the way for­ward was to start as they meant to go on, rather than to start small, the first fes­ti­val ac­cord­ing to Sa­landy-Brown, "was near­ly as big as it is now, four days with lots of events...chil­dren's events run­ning con­cur­rent­ly with the adult events."

The suc­cess of the event re­lied on two things–the ex­per­tise of its or­gan­is­ers, de­scribed by Sa­landy-Brown as "peo­ple who knew peo­ple, writ­ing, pub­lish­ing and Caribbean lit­er­a­ture."Peo­ple like Nicholas Laugh­lin, ed­i­tor of the Caribbean Re­view of Books, pub­lish­er Je­re­my Tay­lor and uni­ver­si­ty lec­tur­ers Mar­jorie Thor­pe and Fun­so Aiye­ji­na–and the es­tab­lish­ment of a lit­er­a­ture prize to en­cour­age the par­tic­i­pa­tion of the re­gions's writ­ers. "We start­ed a prize with One Caribbean Me­dia (OCM)," says Sa­landy-Brown, "and thought even if we get no fun­ders, es­tab­lish­ing the prize would be enough to es­tab­lish the idea and next year we would get peo­ple to fund the fes­ti­val. But we got peo­ple to fund us for the fes­ti­val at once."Sa­landy-Brown de­scribes the OCM Bo­cas Lit­er­ary Prize as a "god­send" ex­plain­ing that it re­al­ly un­earthed many writ­ers.

"There were so many peo­ple writ­ing po­et­ry, so many peo­ple with half a nov­el or an at­tempt­ed nov­el un­der the mat­tress or some­thing," she says, "amaz­ing num­bers of peo­ple at all lev­els of so­ci­ety, men and women who are read­ing and writ­ing and it was if no one had ever giv­en them per­mis­sion to ad­mit it, they wouldn't have."The fes­ti­val cre­at­ed a fo­rum for peo­ple to talk about what they are do­ing," she says, "their as­pi­ra­tions, the ben­e­fits of what they like to do and what writ­ing and read­ing means to them." When the idea for the fes­ti­val was con­ceived, it was in the ab­sence of any in­dus­try sta­tis­tics. "No­body knew how many books were pub­lished, how many writ­ers there were," says Sa­landy-Brown, and so the re­sponse came as a big sur­prise. "We just didn't know there was that much in­ter­est," she says, "but from the very first year, we had like 3,500 at­ten­dances over the four days."