PREE 15 marks a watershed moment for our platform, created eight years ago to showcase the work of writers from, on and about the Caribbean. From the beginning PREE’s existence has been precarious; an open-access platform with no revenue sources to pay ourselves or the large team of writers and editors who generously contribute their […]

Although it spared Kingston, the storm caused $9bn in damage and wiped out most of the heritage buildings and museums in the areas it touched

As one of the most powerful storms on record makes landfall in Jamaica, Annie Paul files a dispatch from the country’s capital, where trees have crushed cars and exploding electricity transformers can be heard all around her

The nature culture divide has been the ruling rubric in determining which animals have the right to be considered human and ipso facto are rights bearers in general—namely those who renounce their animality and are cultured into humanity. Of course, the gatekeepers to humanity are none other than those privileged to attain such status simply by being, by the simple fact of their existence as dominant males occupying the very apex of the totem pole of the universe created by Homo patriarchus.

Grounds of the Edna Manley College of the Visual Arts, 2018 #MeToo has finally reached Jamaica’s shores with a number of female students at Edna Manley College of Visual Art accusing a male lecture…

Hindi novelist, Geetanjali Shree, has been shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize for her novel Tomb of Sand. The winner is to be announced on May 26 and I thought it would be timely to interview Shree as the countdown begins. First for…

I used to read the local papers online but now they’ve started charging for access i do without them, especially as their landing pages have become increasingly cluttered with ads with nary a news story in sight. In fact you wouldn’t even know you…

Annie Paul is an India-born writer and critic based at the University of the West Indies, Mona, where she is head of the Publications Section at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies. In 2020 she published a biography of…

Two days before the next winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize is announced on June 30 it gives us great pleasure to present an in-depth interview with Roland Watson-Grant, an exceptional if lesser known Jamaican author, whose latest short…

Annie Paul “Sound in Jamaica means process, community, strategy and product,” says Louis Chude-Sokei capturing the centrality of the sonic realm to Caribbean culture. Unlike the technologies of literacy that enabled Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined…

Adidja Palmer art Arundhati Roy Bob Marley Bocas Lit Fest Buju Banton Caribbean censorship Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke Cindy Breakspeare Creole Cuba Cultural Studies Dancehall Diana McCaulay Dog Paw gay rights Gaza Gender-based…

My short bio of Stuart Hall, the product of 4 years of work, is now available on Amazon and from UWI Press. Here is a video of Stuart’s 2004 keynote at UWI, Mona at the closing of the Caribbean Reasonings conference in his honor, organized by the…

A report of a radio interview with two Jamaican crew members of the Marella Discovery 2 who were left at sea for 5 weeks and finally arrived home last night–May 6, 2020–to a dubious welcome. I don’t know when last I’ve felt so upset after listening…

It’s been a harrowing year for the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts (EMCVPA) what with a scandal breaking in May about a male art lecturer facing numerous complaints and allegations of sexual abuse by his students. Having ignored…

Tea by the Sea, Donna Heman’s second novel, will be published by Red Hen Press in June 2020. The winner of the 2015 JaWS JAMCOPY Lignum Vitae Award for unpublished manuscripts Heman’s new novel is an important addition to the world of books from the…

Contributed Judy Ann MacMillan’s autobiography Born Ya: The Life and Loves of a Jamaican Painter captures with verve and passion the struggles of a light-skinned Jamaican woman to be a painter in the ‘humid island incubator’ of Jamaica in the latter…

Even though we hardly discuss it in the public sphere here it cannot have escaped our attention that another Caribbean island, Puerto Rico, has been in crisis for some time. Last week that crisis escalated when thousands (as much as half a million…

Edward George Philip Seaga was born in the United States but became Prime Minister of Jamaica in 1980 after the bloodiest election in Jamaica to date. A controversial figure he was beloved by his followers and practitioners of Jamaican folk worship…

This interview with Mr. Edward Seaga was commissioned by Macmillan to accompany the release of his two-volume biography in early 2010. An edited version of it was published at the time but here is the original version. Mr. Seaga was famously,…

An artist we don’t think enough about or include in discussions about Caribbean art is Janine Antoni. Her brother Robert Antoni is better known in the world of Caribbean writing. Perhaps this is because despite Antoni’s Bahamian/Trinidadian…