‘LEECH’, ‘Memories of Flowers’, ‘Ripples From A Broken Soul’ on Guyana prize 2025 shortlist
July 13 2026
Debut novelist Jasmaine Payne’s psychological thriller LEECH, Raywat Deonandan’s A Memory Of Flowers And Coconut and Somnauth Narine’s Ripples From a Broken Soul have been shortlisted for the Guyana Prize for Literature’s Best Book of Fiction (2025) award.
Payne is the only Guyana-based novelist on the fiction shortlist. Deonandan, who wond Fist Book of Fiction in 2000 resides in Canada and Narine, Best Book of Fiction runner-up (2023) in the USA.
An interesting development is the fact that women writers appear to be making further inroads into Guyanese literature.
Non-fiction, Drama, and best Book of Poetry make up the other shortlisted categories, while there is also a Youth Award for poetry and short stories.
The winners in the various categories will be announced between August 7 to August 9.
The jury for the Fiction category released the following citations for the nominated works.
BEST BOOK OF FICTION
A Memory of Flowers and Coconut – Raywat Deonandan.
“This is a technically accomplished collection of twelve short stories, set both ‘at home’ and in the diasporas, that explore various aspects of Indo-Guyanese cultures, histories and heritage. The stylish, measured prose is wry, sardonic and thoughtful; at his best Deonandan demonstrates a mature understanding of what short fiction can do.
Ripples From A Broken Soul by Somnauth Narine “is an ambitious novel that explores difficult human material with tenderness and without sensationalism: a brain-injured son, parents ground down by the daily demands of caregiving, the devastation of love tested by circumstance. The novel’s treatment of Guyanese culture and Hindu tradition is organic rather than ornamental: these are textures that arise naturally from character and situation.”
Jasmaine Payne’s LEECH is described as “an intriguing novel, essentially in the tradition of the Gothic horror story but located within a diasporic Guyanese frame.
The technically ambitious narrative incorporates excerpts from Victorian style tales alongside historical chapters and contemporary action. The Guyanese element threaded through the narrative is intriguing and adds a distinctive dimension to this haunting tall tale.”
POETRY
Mud Psalms by Makeda K Braithwaite (a third place winner in Fiction in 2022)
I Sing To The Greenhearts
by UK-based Maggie Harris
‘The Way Indentured’ by Guyana-based novelist and secondary school teacher Scott Ting-A-Kee
Lahcim II: Sounds From Sorrow Hill by Phebe Wallerson,
The jurors for Poetry noted that “In Makeda K. Braithwaite’s Mud Psalms, every sensation is given breath and animation with convincing range, whether the poems’ speakers reach for the hem of romantic love, or steep themselves in a knowing of their familial roots–the work grounds while it proclaims.”
I Sing To The Greenhearts by Maggie Harris, is an “accomplished and enchanting collection of deeply lived and deeply felt poems that reflects on the poet’s connections to Guyana both as a place of memory and of contemporary encounter with tender knowingness and an extraordinary authenticity of voice”.
The jurors noted that “Scott Ting-a-Kee’s The Way Indentured charts the journey of Chinese indentured labourers to the Caribbean, both illuminating and deepening understandings of an underreported part of our historical map, in poems that frequently move with technical and stylistic poise on the page.
Lahcim II: Sounds from Sorrow Hill by Phebe Wallerson is “a moving, poetic meditation on grief. But what is particularly striking is that this grief is given, colors, shapes, sounds and smell that are unmistakably Guyanese/Caribbean”.
DRAMA
Darren McAlmont’s ‘Return Passage’ Stephan Estwick’s ‘River, Blood, Son’, Seeta Shah Roath’s ‘Kisna’ and Mosa Telford’s ‘The Bell And The Bones’ are shortlisted in the drama category.
McAlmont’s ‘Return Passage’ “explores the experience of Afro-Guyanese immigrants in Canada. We follow the story of a couple leaving their nine year old daughter behind with her grandmother, facing the frigid reality of Canadian life, while keeping a line of hope and promises between their actual and absent lives.
Trapped between expectations and a fear of failure, the protagonists must make their own assessment, ultimately, as to what constitutes success in life.”
Estwick’s River, Blood, Son “invites us to consider the social and psychological matrix from which a tragedy of domestic violence emerges. Using a well-known Guyanese folk song to foreground the story, the writer traces the inheritance of violence and neglect that repeats itself. The writer does not allow the protagonist, however, to avoid his own capacity for choice.
In a style that is both expressionistic (protagonist’s haunted recollection/dream) and symbolist (embodied landscape, objects), the writer carefully constructs and conducts the tragic spectacle of this drama.
Seeta Shah Roath’s Kisna is described as “a historical drama, that portrays the experience of Indian indentureship over the period 1838-1917. The story begins in Calcutta, continues to the port of Demerara, India, before the main characters undertake the perilous journey across the kala pani, arrive and eventually create a life in Demerara/ British Guyana.
Grounded in historical authenticity, the play serves an important educational function in giving credible dramatic life to its characters. “Written as both a screenplay and for stage, the play competently embraces both mediums with compelling realism. At the same time, through the evolution of the eponymous main character, the play sustains its mythic dimension with the story of Krishna. In bringing to the stage the subject of Indian indentureship, the writer privileges, without victimhood or romanticism, an experience rarely explored in Caribbean drama.”
Mosa Telford is a previous Guyana Prize winner for Drama, and her shortlisted play The Bell And The Bones “presents a naked contest between ruthless, acquisitive power and the resource that is African ancestral spirituality.
“While the two households involved show contrasting lifestyles, they are also linked through master-servant relationships, as well as forces of human affection and the fact of physical vulnerability.
The play brings into focus the tradition of land legacy in Afro-Guyanese communities, where emancipated Africans collectively bought freeholding land which was preserved and transferred inter-generationally.
Threatened by the relentless drive toward ‘development’, the characters confront the issues of inequitable power and injustice that affect lives and legacies in the Caribbean and, indeed, the wider world today.”
NON-FICTION
Shortlisted in this category are Tessa Mc Watt’s ‘The Snag: A Mother, A Forest and Wild Grief’; Vilma Nicholls Tafawa’s Guyana’s Bachelor’s Adventure and Paradise Villages; A Mosaic of the History and Culture of a People Liberated’; Joyce Trotman’s ‘Dis Gyrl: The Enchanted Life of Aunty Joyce Trotman.’
Tessa McWatt’s ‘The Snag’ is described as “a beautifully difficult book as it bravely takes on the challenge of articulating a grief larger than language – that is to say, a grief that extends beyond the human and includes insects, birds, trees, forests and melting ice-caps.
This is creative writing propelled by the author’s concerns about the alarming rate of the climate ‘s impact on life juxtaposed with her mother’s affliction with dementia.
Alongside the “forest snags” that she observes, she presents her mother as a model snag choosing “the ambitious goal” to continue to live come what may. The result is a book that is at once deeply personal but profoundly unselfish, welcoming all categories of humans into its somber interior. Here, grief is not wild and untamed like the forests McWatt adores, but is structured, eloquent, and productive.”
‘Guyana’s Bachelor’s Adventure and Paradise Villages’ by Vilma Nicholls Tafawa “offers an insider’s perspective on the history, people and traditions of the Demerara villages of Bachelor’s Adventure and Paradise. Its particular focus on the histories of the Village Movement, access to education, transport, communication and women’s experiences of plantation labour, childbirth and economic entrepreneurship is to be lauded. In its attempt to give a specific example of how reparations for enslavement can be practically carried out through the return of land absorbed by the capitalist machinery of pre-independence Guyana, the author contrasts the care, investment and love of the land held by an agricultural community, with the brutality of extractive colonialism.
Above all, the work, in its representation of the ‘sister’ villages as sites of community achievement, highlights the importance of the individual while celebrating the indomitability of the collective.:
‘Dis Gyrl: The Enchanted Life of Aunty Joyce’ by Trotman Joyce Trotman “is a relatable and compelling story capturing nine decades of real world experiences. The work vividly portrays the colonial environment of a young “Gyrl” , overcoming the challenges of a competitive life at school which formed both her social and scholastic resilience.”
Youth Awards (Short Story and poetry)
POETRY
• Juvell Atherley – “Becoming”
• Mortimer Duke – “Notes towards an incomplete definition”
• Ariel Mohanlall – “Motion” and “Buckets”
• Jessica Persaud – “Oh sea, swallow my pleas”
• Dharshanie Tikapersaud – “Ah still deh” and “By the wata dat doan sleep”
Commenting on the poetry submissions, the jurors stated that they “were astounded by the level of maturity of the poetic voices and by the nature of the themes they wrote about. There was a high degree of intricacy, depth and thought in most of the poems. In some cases, writers were meticulous and wrote with precision and economy, in other cases, they showed intentionality, precision and depth.
Some writers were extremely deliberate with form and lines and were very good in establishing mood and imagery. This shows the attention the writers paid to crafting language. The poems were thoughtful, profound and authentic.”
SHORT STORY (Youth Awards)
• Juvell Atherley – “Saltwater does not forget”
• Nickeisha Bacchus – “Inbound”
• Siara Fernandes – “Eat you whole”
• Jessica Persaud – “The dog I used to be”
• Gabriel West – “Armonia”
The jurors noted that “generally, the writers of the short stories demonstrated a good degree of adeptness in writing; they were creative, original and intentional in the development strategies they used to advance the plots.
There was careful effort by most writers to make use of thorough descriptions, clear, vivid and rich imagery and the appropriate tone. In quite a few cases, writers could have done more to develop and describe their settings and contexts better; however, their cleverness, precision and intentionality stood out.”
