Marina Salandy-Brown never returned to Trinidad for comfort. When she stepped off the plane in 2004, it was not nostalgia but duty that called her back. Her mother, Honora Marie Salandy, was ageing. She would live past one hundred. Marina, her middle child, left a decades-long career at the BBC to care for her.
She had been gone since she was seventeen. Born in Diego Martin, a village of bush and breeze where children were still shaped by creeks and Catholicism, she had grown up moving between Trinidad's government agricultural outposts—Maracas, St Joseph, Matelot—where her father worked as a civil servant. The country, newly postcolonial, was still tethered to the past. She left, as many ambitious young women did, not because she wanted to, but because she needed to.
London gave her a platform. A prize-winning arts and current affairs producer and editor of prominent programmes like Start the Week and Late Night Live, she became a rare thing: a BBC executive of Caribbean origin. She gave airtime to voices that had long been passed over, insisting that the Caribbean and the wider postcolonial world should not be seen as colourful margins but as essential contributors to modern intellectual life.
Her return to Trinidad was meant to be a pause. But in that pause, something stirred. "There was no place," she said in an interview, "where we could come together around books. Where writers from the region, or in exile, or just emerging, could meet each other. It didn't exist." So she built it.
She called it the Bocas Lit Fest, after the Bocas del Dragón—the strait between Trinidad and Venezuela where the Caribbean Sea meets the Atlantic. The name held geography and danger, myth and movement.
The first festival was held in 2011. No one expected it to last, certainly not in Port of Spain and certainly not without initial glossy sponsorship.
But she persisted. She curated it herself. She created platforms for spoken word artists, essayists, dramatists, and those who had never considered themselves writers.
From its first year, Salandy-Brown made it clear: Bocas would not be a poor cousin to Hay or Edinburgh or a carnival of clichés. It would be rigorous, inclusive, political, and literary. It would centre Caribbean voices, not exoticise them.
Salandy-Brown brought in people who had never considered themselves part of a literary world. Spoken-word artists. Calypsonians. Essayists. Elderly women writing memoirs in notebooks. Teenagers from Couva who'd never stepped inside a library. And she made space for them. No Caribbean literary figure in the 21st century has done more to open the doors of the canon.
From the courtyard of the National Library and the Old Fire Station, she drew strands from Kingston, Georgetown, Bridgetown, London, Toronto, Delhi, New York, and more. Booker Prize winners like Marlon James stood beside new poets reading for the first time. Literary agents from major publishing houses sat through panel discussions with primary school teachers from Morvant. From the beginning, the festival was serious and democratic. Bocas became a borderless space.
Over the next decade, Bocas became the Anglophone Caribbean's largest and most important literary festival. And Salandy-Brown, its architect and steward, established the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, now the region's leading award for fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. She co-founded the Hollick Arvon Prize, which later became the Johnson and Amoy Achong Prize, offering unpublished writers recognition and mentoring from international authors and editors.
Marina Salandy Brown's Newsday columns remain about literary advocacy. In one column titled The Experience of Life (Newsday, April 2024), she wrote: "People are not only struggling to make ends meet, they are struggling with understanding what it means to be part of a larger narrative, to be seen and heard. If you don't see yourself in books, you begin to forget you exist."
Elsewhere, she is even sharper: "We are culturally illiterate in many ways. We know too little about our own writers. We privilege imported ideas because we were taught to distrust our own."
The National Gas Company of Trinidad and Tobago (NGC), recognising the power of cultural investment, became the title sponsor in 2012. From overseas, the Hollick Family Charitable Trust partnered with the UK's Arvon Foundation to support emerging Caribbean writers. Eventually, One Caribbean Media, owners of the Trinidad Express and CNC3, committed to funding the region's premier literary prize.
In 2011, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize was awarded to Derek Walcott for White Egrets. That moment crystallised the seriousness of intent. Since then, the prize has gone to Earl Lovelace (2012), Monique Roffey (2013), Robert Antoni (2014), Vladimir Lucien (2015), Olive Senior (2016), Kei Miller (2017), Jennifer Rahim (2018), Kevin Adonis Browne (2019), Richard Georges (2020), Canisia Lubrin (2021), Celeste Mohammed (2022), Ayanna Lloyd Banwo (2023), Safiya Sinclair (2024), and Myriam J.A. Chancy (2025). Finalists in each genre category—fiction, poetry, and non-fiction—are publicly honoured and welcomed into the Bocas circle.
In 2025, the Bocas Lit Fest opened with a tribute to Earl Lovelace at 90. A lecture was delivered by Professor Emeritus Kenneth Ramchand.
Freetown Collective performed. The tribute coincided with the release of Lovelace's new poetry collection, The Beginning of a Journey.
Salandy Brown has carried a literary festival, a vision of Caribbean dignity and excellence, on her shoulders. She has read submitted work for prizes and set up independent, distinguished panels of judges.
Recognition came. In 2005, Salandy Brown was awarded an Honorary Doctorate (DLitt) from the University of Westminster. In 2013, the University of the West Indies followed suit. In 2020, she was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. That same year, Chile awarded her the Ferdinand Magellan Award for contributions to the arts. Two years later, her country gave her the Hummingbird Medal (Silver) for her cultural service. When asked about it, she replied simply: "I am grateful. But the work continues."
Since 2022, the festival's directorship has formally passed to Nicholas Laughlin, a longtime collaborator who has shaped Bocas's literary and editorial direction from the beginning. He works closely with poet and critic Shivanee Ramlochan and a committed team to guide the festival forward.
Salandy- Brown has not relinquished the festival's soul, only broadened the circle of its caretakers.
As President of the Board of Directors Marina Salandy-Brown remains deeply involved providing strategic oversight and ensuring the integrity of its mission.
What she (and the Bocas team, now ably led by Festival Director Nicholas Laughlin) most need now is not more accolades but for the country and its corporate class to step up and support what Bocas represents: not a one-off event, but a vital institution sustaining the very fabric of Caribbean society. "A literary festival is not a luxury," she has said. "It is part of the infrastructure of who we are and who we might become."
For years, Salandy-Brown managed spreadsheets, wrote funding proposals, and did the often-dispiriting and tough work of asking the corporate world to invest in the commodity with the highest long-term returns—the hearts and minds of a nation - through literature.
The already on-board sponsors recognise that in a country grappling with violence and illiteracy, supporting literature means democratically giving the voiceless a voice and ultimately ushering the nation's soul towards productivity and prosperity.
More sponsors are required to keep this momentum going, which some will equate with the very survival of this nation st.
Salandy-Brown told Newsday in May 2025: "When we started, people said, 'A literary festival? But nobody reads in Trinidad.' I said, 'It's not true! People do read and they do wrie, but nobody's given them permission to put their hands up.'"
Years ago, she said, her garbage collector rang the bell and said he wrote poetry. She gave him the mic. He read.
And Marina, as always, stood slightly offstage, listening. Taking it in. Handing over, quietly, what she had spent her life building.
Ira Mathur is a freelance journalist and a columnist for the Trinidad Guardian. Mathur is the author of Love the Dark Days, which won the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction.
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