The Bocas Lit Fest 2025, with the theme “Always coming home”, returns to Port of Spain for its fifteenth edition from May 1 – 4, 2025.
The Bocas Lit Fest is a literary festival that takes place annually in the Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. Inaugurated in 2011, it is the first major literary festival in the southern Caribbean and the largest literary festival in the Anglophone Caribbean.
The 2025 program edition was unveiled at a media conference at The Writers Centre in St. Clair, Port of Spain on Tuesday, March 26. The main festival venue will be the National Library in downtown Port of Spain, with satellite events at other venues around the city. The programme includes 50 events for adult, teenage, and child audiences, and over 100 writers, speakers, and performers. On the card will be readings, panel discussions, book launches, poetry performances and more.
The opening night on May 1 will pay tribute to eminent author Earl Lovelace in an early commemoration of his 90th birthday. Earl Wilbert Lovelace is a Trinidad and Tobago novelist, journalist, playwright, and short story writer born on July 13, 1935. He studied in the USA at Howard University and in the Johns Hopkins writing programme. Whilst being mainly based in Trinidad, he taught at several American universities in the 1970s. His first novel, While Gods Are Falling was published in 1965, followed by The Schoolmaster, The Dragon Can’t Dance, The Wine of Astonishment, and Salt, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1997.
The winner of the annual OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, whose shortlist was revealed on March 17, will be announced on May 4.
“We often describe our annual festival as a kind of homecoming for Caribbean writers and readers,” said Festival and Programme Director Nicholas Laughlin. “Over the past 15 years, the Bocas Lit Fest has grown into the biggest annual assembly of writers from the Caribbean and its several diasporas. So in a very tangible sense, ‘Always Coming Home’” reminds us of our festival’s role as Caribbean literature’s family reunion.”
Those scheduled to appear on festival stages include Erna Brodber, Marlon James, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Justin Haynes, Berkley Semple, Christina Cooke, Kai Thomas, Olive Senior, Celeste Mohammed, among others.
OCM, First Citizens, the JB Fernandes Memorial Trust, and the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and the Arts are main sponsors of the 2025 Bocas Lit Fest; the British Council, the Windham Campbell Prizes, Murphy Clarke, the Massy Foundation, and The UWI are sponsors.
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