Erato Ioannou (Cyprus) is a Cypriot writer born in Paphos and currently living in Nicosia. She writes in both English and Greek. Her collection of short stories Cats Have It All was published in 2004 and since then her work has appeared in various literary magazines. Her short stories ‘Madwoman Story’ and ‘From One to the Other Horizon’ were anthologised in the UK and Greece, respectively. She is the associate editor of In Focus magazine, an Anglophone journal on literature and the arts in Cyprus. She is currently juggling the demands of motherhood, working and agonising over publishing her novel.
Marlon James (Jamaica) was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1970. His first novel John Crow’s Devil was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. The Book of Night Women won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, as well as an NAACP Image Award. His third novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, was awarded the Man Booker Prize in 2015, among other honours.
Emma Kate Lewis (Malta) was born in Malta and is currently living in Brisbane, Australia. She studies journalism, English literature and writing at the University of Queensland. Her nonfiction is published in the indie feminist magazine Hot Chicks with Big Brains, and her fiction can be found in Voiceworks, an Australian quarterly journal for writers under the age of twenty-five.
Karlo Mila (Tonga) is of Tongan and Palangi (NZ European) descent. Her first book of poetry Dream Fish Floating won Best First Book of Poetry in the New Zealand Book Awards. She is widely published in anthologies. Her second book A Well Written Body involved collaboration with the artist Delicia Sampero. She has lived, worked and attended school in Tonga. She has a PhD in Sociology. She currently lives in Auckland, New Zealand, with her three sons.
Jacob Ross (Grenada) is a novelist, short story writer, editor and creative writing tutor. His novel Pynter Bender was published to much critical literary acclaim and was shortlisted for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and chosen as one of the British Authors Club’s top three Best First Novels. He is also the author of two short story collections, Song for Simone and A Way to Catch the Dust, and the editor of Closure, an anthology of contemporary Black British short stories. His latest novel, The Bone Readers, won the Inaugural Jhalak Prize (2017), and is the first in his Camaho Quartet. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been a judge of the V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize and the Olive Cook, Scott Moncrieff and Tom-Gallon Literary Awards.
Melanie Schwapp (Jamaica) writes from her experience of racism and the devastating loss of her twin babies at birth. Having worked at an advertising agency and a pharmacy, she went on to write the children’s book Lally-May’s Farm Suss. Her novel Dew Angels won the 2014 Literary Classics Gold Award on Cultural Issues and Words on Wings Award. She writes a blog, Schwapping Around, and in between offers garden landscaping and interior decorating services. She lives in Kingston, Jamaica, with her husband and three children.
Mere Taito (Rotuma, Fiji) is a Rotuman Islander, from the Polynesian island of Rotuma, situated north of Fiji. Her work has been published in several Pacific Island anthologies, including Dreadlocks, Saraqa, Writing the Pacific and Vasu, as well as the New Zealand literary journals Landfall and A Fine Line. Her poem ‘The quickest way to trap a folktale’, which addresses the issue of intellectual property and ownership of documented Rotuman mythology by research institutions, was recently published in Manifesto Aotearoa, an anthology of political poetry. She moved to New Zealand in 2007, where she lives with her partner Neil and her nephew Lapuke.
Mikoyan Vekula (Niue) was born in the village of Avatele, Niue Island — the Rock, as it’s affectionately known by many, or Savage Island, its name of old. He has completed a creative writing course over three years at Whitireia Polytechnic, Wellington, New Zealand. He has chosen poetry as a genre for creative expression and has an ambition of writing poems and short stories from an island perspective. He is currently working on a collection of poems for future publication.
Commonwealth Writers
Commonwealth Writers is the cultural initiative of the Commonwealth Foundation. It inspires and connects writers and storytellers across the world, bringing personal stories to a global audience. Commonwealth Writers believes in the transformative power of creative expression in all its forms. Both responsive and proactive, it works with local and international partners to identify and deliver a wide range of cultural projects. The activities take place in Commonwealth countries, but Commonwealth Writers’ community is global.
The Commonwealth Foundation
The Commonwealth Foundation was established by Heads of Government in support of the idea that the Commonwealth is as much an association of peoples as it is of governments. It is a unique, stand-alone organisation; it is funded by and reports to governments, which have given it a mandate to support civil society. The Foundation is dedicated to advancing people’s participation in promoting responsive, effective and accountable governance so that ultimately their quality of life is improved. The Foundation is the Commonwealth’s agency for arts and culture.
Peekash Press
Peekash Press is dedicated to publishing the work of emerging Caribbean writers living at home in the region, and presenting a new generation of literary talent to an international audience. Begun in 2014 as a partnership between Peepal Tree Press in the United Kingdom and Akashic Books in the United States (hence the name), Peekash evolved from the CaribLit initiative, devised by the Bocas Lit Fest in partnership with Commonwealth Writers and the British Council.
In 2017, in keeping with the original intention to bring Peekash “home” to a physical base in the Caribbean, the Bocas Lit Fest assumed responsibility for the imprint.
Based in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, the Bocas Lit Fest is a not-for-profit organisation working to develop and promote Caribbean writers and writing, through an annual literary festival, a series of prizes, and year-round programmes and projects aimed at writer and reader development.
Visit www.bocaslitfest.com for more information.
All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Peekash Press under agreement with Telegram, 26 Westbourne Grove, London W2 5RH, and distributed in North America by Akashic Books. ©2018 Commonwealth Foundation
Copyright for individual texts rests with the authors.
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61775-670-2
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-61775-674-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018935164
Peekash Press
38 Coblentz Avenue
Cascade, Port of Spain
Trinidad and Tobago
www.peekashpress.com
First printing
Akashic Books
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Akashic Books is an award-winning independent company dedicated to publishing urban literary fiction and political nonfiction by authors who are either ignored by the mainstream, or who have no interest in working within the ever-consolidating ranks of the major corporate publishers. Akashic Books hosts additional imprints, including the Black Sheep for Young Readers, the Akashic Noir Series, the Akashic Drug Chronicles Series, the Akashic Urban Surreal
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