The 2025 Bocas Henry Swanzy Award for Distinguished Service to Caribbean Letters has been awarded to the pioneering Journal of West Indian Literature, the foremost periodical dedicated to Anglophone Caribbean literary scholarship. This announcement was made on March 26 during a media conference to unveil the programme for the 2025 Bocas Lit Fest.
First presented in 2013, the Bocas Henry Swanzy Award is named for the late BBC World Service radio producer (1915-2004). Swanzy’s work as an editor and producer on Caribbean Voices, the programme originally founded by Una Marson of Jamaica, provided a landmark platform for Caribbean writing in the 1940s and 50s, broadcasting fiction, poems, essays, and criticism by West Indian writers across the region.
Created by the Bocas Lit Fest in Swanzy’s memory, this award celebrates the contributions of editors, broadcasters, publishers, critics, and others who have devoted their careers to developing Caribbean literature. Bocas Henry Swanzy Awardees are chosen by the festival’s organisers and honoured annually at the Bocas Lit Fest.
All the previous winners of the Bocas Henry Swanzy Award have been individuals. This year’s award breaks new ground, recognising an institution that is also a collective.
“Much pioneering work in the creative field, as in scholarship, is the product of collective and collaborative effort,” said Nicholas Laughlin, festival and programme director, explaining the deviation from tradition.
“As we mark the 15th year of the Festival, it is an appropriate moment to expand the scope of the Swanzy Award in this way, and set a new precedent.”
The Journal of West Indian Literature—known familiarly by its acronym, JWIL—was first published in 1986. From its beginning, the publication has been a collaboration among the campuses of The University of the West Indies, rooted in earlier efforts to firmly establish and validate West Indian literature as a scholarly field.
Over the decades—first in print and, since 2015, as an entirely online journal—JWIL has published approximately 1,000 pieces: scholarly articles, book reviews, and interviews, as well as occasional creative works. Contributors have ranged from eminent senior scholars—some of them rightly known as parents of West Indian literary studies—to early-career researchers. Publishing a peer-reviewed piece in JWIL has long been considered a rite of passage within the discipline.
The 2025 Bocas Henry Swanzy Award will be formally presented to current co-editors in chief Michael Bucknor and Lisa Outar, on behalf of JWIL, at the Festival prize ceremony on May 3, followed by a discussion of the history, mission, and evolution of the journal on May 4.
