Many congratulations to Jason Allen-Paisant, who has been longlisted for the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature with his second collection of poems, Self-Portrait as Othello!

The annual prize, now in its 14th year, recognises books in three genre categories — poetry, fiction, and literary non-fiction — published by authors of Caribbean birth or citizenship in the preceding year. Five different countries and territories are represented among the authors of the nine books longlisted for the 2024 Prize.

In the poetry category, the three books longlisted are by younger writers widely considered among the most talented of their generation. Alongside Jason on the poetry longlist are Ishion Hutchinson and Nicole Sealey.

In the second stage of judging for the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize, the judges will announce the winners in the three genre categories on Sunday 7 April. These will go on to compete for the overall Prize of US$10,000, to be announced on Saturday 27 April, during the 14th annual NGC Bocas Lit Fest in Port of Spain.

Read more about the longlisted books and the prize here.

Jason Allen-Paisant's debut collection Thinking With Trees won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for poetry and was an Irish Times and White Review Book of the Year 2021. In Poetry London Maryam Hessavi wrote, 'Jason Allen-Paisant is uncompromising when digging down through the undergrowth of our imperialist past – and yet he succeeds in replanting new narratives in the same soil where these toxic ideologies used to, and still, reside.'

The interlocking poems of his second collection, Self-Portrait as Othello, imagine Othello in the urban landscapes of modern London, Paris and Venice and invent the kinds of narrative he might tell about his intersecting identities. Poetic memoir and ekphrastic experiment, Self-Portrait as Othello focuses on a character at once fictional and real. Othello here represents a structure of feeling that was emerging in seventeenth-century Venice, and is still with us.

Portraiting himself as Othello, Allen-Paisant refracts his European travels and considers the Black male body, its presence, transgressiveness and vulnerabilities. Othello's intertwined identities as 'immigrant' and 'Black', which often operate as mutually reinforcing vectors, speak to us in the landscape of twenty-first-century Europe.

The collection is winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023 and the the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023, as well as being the Poetry Book Society Spring Choice 2023 and a Guardian and The Irish Times Book of the Year. It is currently also shortlisted for the Writers’ Prize 2024.