OCM Bocas Prize 2026: McWatt, Lubrin & Haynes Deliver a Prize Season for the Ages
- May 10
- 6 min read
On the evening of Saturday, May 2, 2026, the Bocas Lit Fest in Port of Spain delivered its most awaited moment: the announcement of the overall winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. In a year of exceptional shortlists, the judges chose Tessa McWatt’s The Snag: A Mother, a Forest, and Wild Grief, a memoir of loss, nature and inheritance that moved the panel with its quiet, devastating power. In doing so, McWatt became the first Guyanese writer in the prize’s fifteen-year history to claim the top honour, earning the US$10,000 grand prize.
The announcement capped a week-long celebration of Caribbean writing at its 16th annual festival, with hundreds of readers, writers and literary champions gathering in Trinidad’s capital under the theme “All Together Now.” The three category winners: McWatt in literary nonfiction, Canisia Lubrin in poetry, and Justin Haynes in fiction, represent the extraordinary range and depth of contemporary Caribbean letters: a Guyanese-Canadian professor meditating on her mother’s death in a forest; a St. Lucian poet reconstructing grief in a hybrid Caribbean voice; a Trinidad-born debut novelist navigating the Venezuelan refugee crisis from a small village in his homeland. Together, they make an unanswerable case for the vitality of the form.
“Three books. Three islands.”
THE PRIZE: CARIBBEAN LITERATURE’S HIGHEST HONOUR
The OCM Bocas Prize, now in its 16th year, is the most coveted award for Caribbean authors writing in English. Sponsored by One Caribbean Media, owner of the Trinidad and Tobago Express, TV6, and the OCM radio network, it accepts entries in three categories: poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction. The overall winner takes US$10,000; category runners-up each receive US$3,000. Books are eligible if written by a single author who holds Caribbean citizenship or was born in the Caribbean, making the prize a powerful instrument of literary recognition for a diaspora that spans the globe.
The 2026 edition drew fifteen writers to its final shortlists, spanning Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, St. Lucia and beyond. With each passing year, the prize grows in international stature, and the 2026 cohort of winners is certain to accelerate that recognition further.
Tessa McWatt did not arrive at the OCM Bocas Prize as a stranger. In 2020, her critical memoir "Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging" won the prize’s nonfiction category, marking her as one of the most probing voices in Caribbean letters. The Snag is something altogether different in register, more intimate, more elemental, more raw, and its selection as the 2026 overall winner signals a jury willing to reward work that reaches past craft into genuine emotional truth.
The memoir is built around a central image: a snag, the forestry term for a standing dead tree, decayed, hollowed, yet still upright, still inhabited. It is the metaphor through which McWatt processes the death of her mother and the experience of grief in all its wild, non-linear forms. Moving between a forest in Canada and the landscapes of her Guyanese inheritance, the book asks what it means to lose a parent, to lose a homeland, to lose a version of yourself, and what, if anything, is left standing afterward.
“Loss, memory, and the forest’s patience: McWatt builds a memoir as alive as the trees she walks among.”
McWatt’s biography is itself a study in the Caribbean diaspora experience. Born in Georgetown, Guyana, she moved to Canada at the age of three and grew up in Toronto — a city she describes as simultaneously welcoming and distancing. She studied English literature at Queen’s University before earning her MA at the University of Toronto, with a focus on post-colonial literature. She is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, and in 2021 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, one of the most prestigious literary honours in the English-speaking world.
Her body of work spans seven novels and two major works of nonfiction, all circling questions of race, belonging, diaspora and the body. With The Snag, she has added a new dimension: the memoir as act of ecological witness, of grieving in and through the natural world. It is, by any measure, a landmark book, and its Bocas Prize victory will introduce it to a far wider Caribbean readership.
The Snag is published by Random House Canada and Scribe (UK/Australia).
It says something remarkable about Canisia Lubrin that winning the 2026 OCM Bocas Prize for poetry felt less like a breakthrough than a confirmation. The St. Lucian-Canadian poet had already taken the prize’s poetry category in 2021 with The Dyzgraphxst, a formally adventurous and critically acclaimed collection. Returning to the shortlist five years later with The World After Rain: Anne’s Poem, she has demonstrated a consistency of vision that very few writers, in any genre, on any continent, can match.
The collection is, at its heart, a long poem for and about Lubrin’s mother, Anne, written in anticipatory grief, in the shadow of an approaching loss. The judges described it as “a sustained meditation on anticipated grief for the poet’s mother,” praise that undersells the ambition of what Lubrin has attempted. The World After Rain is not simply an elegy; it is an investigation of how a daughter’s love is shaped by culture, language, diaspora and the particular grammar of a Caribbean upbringing.
The judges went further, noting that the collection contains “slippery evocative and fresh poetic phrases that are somehow, at once, futuristic and nostalgic,” and that it creates “a hybrid Caribbean poetics that encapsulates its past and projects it into a new future.” That phrase, a poetics of past and future held simultaneously, captures something essential about Lubrin’s project. She is not writing from nostalgia, nor from a simple wish to modernise. She is building a new Caribbean literary language from the materials of both.
“Futuristic and nostalgic at once, Lubrin builds a poetics that belongs entirely to the Caribbean imagination.”
Lubrin was born in St. Lucia and is based in Canada, where she has built a reputation as both a poet and an editor of major importance. She holds an academic position at the University of Guelph and has been a vocal advocate for Caribbean and Black writers in the Canadian literary ecosystem. The World After Rain: Anne’s Poem is published by Soft Skull Press.
Of the three 2026 category winners, Justin Haynes may be the least familiar name to Caribbean readers, but "Ibis", his debut novel, is the kind of book that announces a major talent in a single sentence. Set largely in a small village in Trinidad and Tobago, it traces a young Venezuelan migrant’s desperate search to find her mother, a narrative that moves, in the words of the judges, “dizzyingly across eras,” blending magical realism with what they called “Naipaulian humor.” The Naipaul comparison is both high praise and entirely apt: Ibis possesses that quality of Trinidadian prose that is at once comic and profound, locally rooted and universally felt.
At its core, the novel is a reckoning with the Venezuelan refugee crisis and the way it has reshaped life along the Caribbean’s southern border. Trinidad and Tobago has absorbed hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants in recent years, a fact that is simultaneously a humanitarian challenge, a cultural transformation, and, in Haynes’ hands, a literary opportunity. He writes of these intimate bonds, displaced families and broken borders not from a position of political commentary but from within the skin of individual lives. The result is a novel that earns its depth through particularity.
“Ibis arrives like a force of nature: a debut that reads like a dozen years of fiction already lived.”
Ibis has gathered significant recognition beyond the Bocas Prize. The novel was shortlisted for the 2025 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the 2026 PEN America Open Book Award, acknowledgements from the American literary establishment that reinforce what Bocas judges have now confirmed: this is one of the most significant Caribbean debut novels in a generation.
Haynes was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, and earned his MFA from the University of Notre Dame before continuing graduate studies at Vanderbilt University. He now teaches English at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia, where he lives. Ibis is published by Overlook Press.
Step back and the 2026 OCM Bocas Prize tells a story about Caribbean literature at a particular moment in its development. Three winners from three very different trajectories, a Guyanese-Canadian Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; a St. Lucian poet reshaping the possibilities of the form from a Canadian university; a Trinidad-born debut novelist teaching in Atlanta, and yet three books united by an instinct for the interior life, for what it costs to grieve, to belong, to search, to arrive. The Caribbean diaspora, in all its geographic and generational sprawl, has rarely been so richly represented in a single prize cycle.
For readers, the instruction is simple: put these three books on your list.
Read "The Snag" for its luminous meditation on loss and landscape.
Read "The World After Rain" for a poetic voice unlike any other working in Caribbean literature today.
Read "Ibis" for the pleasure and urgency of a storyteller who has found his full power on the first attempt.
Caribbean excellence, as this platform has always maintained, takes many forms. In literature, it looks like this.
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