Out Of The Caribbean: Tessa McWatt wins the OCM Bocas Prize 2026
Tessa McWatt won OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the region’s most prestigious literary award, for her memoir The Snag: A Mother, a Forest, and Wild Grief. Tessa McWatt was born in Guyana, raised in Canada, and is now a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. She is, in […]
Black News 
Tessa McWatt won OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the region’s most prestigious literary award, for her memoir The Snag: A Mother, a Forest, and Wild Grief.
Tessa McWatt was born in Guyana, raised in Canada, and is now a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. She is, in the most lived sense of the word, a diasporan.
Her now award-winning and critically acclaimed book circles around the death of her mother and the strange, disorienting process of mourning someone across distance: the geographic and psychic distances that had accumulated over a lifetime. It reaches into the forest, into the body, into the deep grammar of what it means to grieve a woman who was herself connected to a land you only half remember. To read it is to feel the sometimes heavy confusion of diasporic inheritance: the things passed down are real, but the ground they grew from is somewhere else.
McWatt told the Port of Spain audience that, for someone who left the Caribbean at a young age, events like Bocas Lit Fest kept her connected to her essence, illustrating the importance of welcoming diaspora writers who spend their lives away from their roots and are trying to tune back into that frequency from increasingly great distances.
The Bocas Prize has always understood this. Its mandate stretches across the Caribbean region and its diaspora, holding space for writers who carry the culture in their blood, even when they carry it across oceans. McWatt joining that lineage from her home and work in England, via her upbringing in Canada, feels like exactly the kind of recognition the prize was built to give.
What The Snag asks, quietly and without sentimentality, is: what do you owe the dead when the dead are also a geography? And what does it mean to win a Caribbean prize for a book about grief when that grief is itself, in part, about the Caribbean you could not hold onto?
As the overall winner, Tessa McWatt received a cash award of US$10,000, sponsored by One Caribbean Media.
