Nominated for the Guyana Prize

It was sometime in 2000, back when I was months away from defending my PhD, and working full-time for the Arthritis Community Research & Evaluation Unit in Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto. My publisher called to tell me that my first published book, my short story collection Sweet Like Saltwater, had won the Guyana Prize, which is the national book award of Guyana, the nation of my birth.

I was shocked and elated. And the adventure that would unfold in the coming months, as I traveled to Guyana for the first time as an adult, is a complex story that I have always intended to put to paper. But I will not do so now.

Because it has almost happened again. My latest collection of short stories, A Memory of Flowers and Coconut, has just been announced as one of the three finalists for the Guyana Prize this year.

Journalist Michael Jordan recently published interviews with the nominees. I’m going to re-post my answers here for posterity:

>1. How does it feel to be once again shortlisted for Guyana’s most prestigious literary award?

I am genuinely overwhelmed. Guyana is “a country on the move” and is expressing itself on the world stage with renewed energy. The revitalization of the Guyana Prize is an expression of that vigour, and I am sincerely grateful to be given the opportunity to be part of this energetic renewal.

The evolution of Guyanese expression these past few decades has been wondrous to behold. Exciting new voices have emerged, both locally and internationally. They have such interesting and weighty things to say. At my advancing age, to still be counted among those voices is high praise indeed.

>2. What would being a second-time winner mean for you, were this to happen?

It would mean everything. To be blunt, I do not expect it to happen; the competition is stiff. But if by some celestial intervention, my work was chosen, it would signal to me that my particular brand of artistry is still relevant and vibrant, and I would take it as license to further deepen my commitment to literary writing, something upon which my eye has lost some focus in recent years.

I’ve recently lost both of my parents. And while I was born in Guyana and worked there on various projects over the years, it was my parents who served as my cultural anchor to the place. Their absence has left me floundering to reconnect to my birthland and to find a way to connect my young son there, as well. Being part of Guyana’s current cultural expression would greatly help me in that quest.

>3. How long did it take you to put together your collection? How challenging was this?

The collection includes stories written as far back as 1993, with 5 of the 12 narratives previously published in literary magazines around the world. Once I decided to publish them together as a single tome, it took a couple of months of fresh editing to get them publication-ready.

The hardest part wasn’t the curation and editing of this collection of stories. It was finding the courage to re-enter the world of professional fiction writing. My last book of fiction was published in 2003. Since then, I have committed myself to nonfiction, whether through academic or journalistic writing. The little fiction writing I wrote was private. I secretly wondered if I had lost the ability to create quality fiction, like an unused muscle allowed to wither and thus rendered unable to exert force.

It was with a great deal of trepidation that I made this collection public, as I feared I had lost the critical eye for discerning quality from dross. Having this book make the Guyana Prize shortlist fills me with more relief than you can imagine.

>4. Is there a new project on the horizon?

I am always writing books, mostly nonfiction. I have a bestselling series on the application of ancient philosophy to modern problems and am completing a new entry in that series, drawing on the philosophical excellence of ancient Greece, Rome, India, and China.

In terms of fiction, for some years now, I have been struggling to complete a novella in the speculative fiction genre. To be candid, it has been an insidious lack of confidence that has prevented me from making much headway on this project. But this good news from Guyana may be the match I need to light a fire under my procrastinating, complacent backside.

Here are this year’s finalists:

And here are the jurors who will decide our fate: