Opening Speech by Dzekashu MacViban

Homespun Words/Worlds
Keynote by Annie Paul

The keynote lecture by founder and editor of PREE, Annie Paul, assesses the politics and poetics of articulating the creolescapes of the Caribbean. Drawing from discourse around creoles in literary histories and the publishing practices of PREE, Homespun Words/Worlds is a reflection on writing and publishing in and from post colonies in the twenty-first century. The keynote explores questions such as how can publishing practices be shaped to give authors international visibility far beyond the Caribbean? What does an engagement with colonial and postcolonial histories reveal about how to understand the urgency and discourse of creoles in relation to the accessibility of knowledge?


Reading and conversation with Marlon James and Annie Paul

In a discussion on Marlon James’s practice as a writer,  the ways in which he continually reinvents his oeuvre, pushes the boundaries of genre expectations, and shifts his centre of gravity are brought into conversation. From John Crow’s Devil to Moon Witch, Spider King, James’s ambitious works explore worldbuilding, history, erasure, and languages through marginal characters, and offer a polyphony of voices through which we encounter familiar and strange worlds.