News that Lisa Allen-Agostini’s debut novel, The Bread the Devil Knead, has been shortlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction might be a cause for celebration in her native Trinidad, but it will come as no great surprise there. This small Caribbean island, the larger of the two-island state it forms with Tobago – with a combined population of just 1.4 million – has long punched far above its weight, producing the groundbreaking historian CLR James, as well as two Nobel laureates.
VS Naipaul, representing prose, was a grudging son of the island, who pointed out in his 2001 Nobel lecture that only through leaving could he learn about his own history; Derek Walcott, in the poetry corner, was an enraptured adopted son who, in his own 1992 lecture, proclaimed the island’s capital, Port of Spain, a polyglot “writer’s heaven”. Poetry and prose have continued to thrive at home and among an increasingly formidable diaspora, with Naipaul’s own extended family alone going on to produce the Quebec-based chevalier des lettres Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Anthony Ezekiel Capildeo, winner of the UK’s richest poetry prize, the Forward.
