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Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Literary voices light up Hotel Normandie

by

Guardian Media Limited
23 days ago
20250622

Read­ing en­thu­si­asts were treat­ed to a spe­cial Evening of Tea and Read­ings on June 14 at Ho­tel Nor­mandie, host­ed by Pa­per Based Book­shop.

Scores of at­ten­dees packed the room as lo­cal au­thors such as Ce­leste Mo­hammed, Richard Char­ran, Ann Lakhan, RSA Gar­cia, and Ryan Ba­choo read from their lat­est works.

Mo­hammed had the room fre­quent­ly erupt­ing in laugh­ter and ea­ger to hear what came next as she read from her new nov­el, Ever Since We Small. Writ­ten al­most en­tire­ly in Trinida­di­an di­alect, the book is es­pe­cial­ly im­pact­ful when heard in the au­thor’s own voice. Vet­er­an writer Char­ran was an­oth­er stand­out, us­ing his read­ing to re­flect on the chang­ing land­scape of jour­nal­ism.

He en­cour­aged his fel­low writ­ers not to lose hope in the age of ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence. Char­ran read from his lat­est nov­el, The Vil­lage of One, paus­ing at one point to ask, “What of our cul­tur­al his­to­ry? The his­to­ries of the peo­ple who ac­tu­al­ly made this place?”

Some of the es­says in his book—The Last Rum Shop­keep­er, Love on the Wharf, and The Sto­ry of Leon Ho­race Park—high­light the every­day lives of peo­ple in T&T.

As Char­ran ex­plained, “This is a book about small, sa­cred lives. Se­cret loves. For­got­ten peo­ple. The mar­gin­alised. And a re­minder that when some­one like Hugo Quan Vie dies, a piece of Trinidad and To­ba­go is for­ev­er lost—and we are poor­er for it.”

Guardian Me­dia jour­nal­ist Ryan Ba­choo read from his de­but nov­el, An Un­end­ing Search, which was launched in Jan­u­ary.

Lakhan shared a se­ries of po­ems that took lis­ten­ers on an emo­tion­al and, at times, ex­hil­a­rat­ing jour­ney. Gar­cia read from two of her works, in­clud­ing The Night­ward.


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