Forward Prize winner Capildeo hails parents

“When my father, the poet Devendranath Capildeo, read his new works to me, or my mother Leila recited poetry in English, French, and Spanish by heart, I don’t think they imagined the effect it was having on the child I was,” Capildeo told Newsday.

“I am very grateful to them, to Carcanet, and to the Forward Arts Foundation for their openness and support. All the shortlisted poets show genuine diversity and originality, which is heartening. This is my fifth full collection and seventh publication, so I guess the lucky number combination paid off!” Capildeo won the prize for her collection Measures of Expatriation, a work in which boundaries and forms are transgressed. Its language and technique mirror our complexity. Just as the book’s pieces overlap between poetry with prose, the individual is rendered as a person who voyages across countries, times, states of mind, families, races, genders, and even bodies. “She is away”, is the collection’s succinct opening line. But that statement is really a loaded question. How many ways can we be away? If there is an argument in this work it may be the idea that we are always somewhere else.

In this sense, the book is deeply political (what poem is not?) It seeks to champion liberty above all; the liberty of the individual in our naturally varied modes throughout space, time and terrain.

It is a catholic book, saying we are all none of the above and therefore all of the above. And it is exquisitely crafted, with voices as varied and unruly as the diversity being commemorated. A democracy, a chorus.

It is fitting, then, that the book’s victory is the second in a row for a woman (Jamaican Claudia Rankine won last year; Tiphanie Yanique also won this year’s prize for best first book). And it is also fitting that it is the third year a person with Caribbean ties has won (Jamaican Kei Miller won the overall prize in 2014).

Capildeo was born in Trinidad in June 1973. She studied at Dunn Ross Prep School then St Joseph’s Convent. She would later read English Language and Literature at Oxford and then pursue a DPhil in Old Norse on a Rhodes Scholarship.

After graduating, Capildeo became a research assistant with the Oxford English Dictionary. Her books include No Traveller Returns (Salt), Undraining Sea, Dark and Unaccustomed Words (Egg Box Publishing) and Utter (Peepal Tree Press).

Capildeo is a cousin of Nobel Laureate VS Naipaul. Her father was children’s poet Devendranath Capildeo. Her grandfather was Simbhoonath Capildeo, the elder brother of Rudranath Capildeo.

Her uncle, Crisen Bissoondath, married Sati Naipaul, a sister of Vidia.

Founder and director of the NCG Bocas Lit Fest Marina Salandy- Brown sees Capildeo’s victory as an important one for the Caribbean.

“We are at an exceptional time on our literary history,” she said last month. “It is indeed a great and unprecedented Caribbean victory and Bocas has been on the tide as it has been turning in our favour, helping to bring more of our writers to international attention. We are constantly busy with our behind-the-scenes work promoting our writers in key international literary circles.” Quoting Shakespeare, she added, “There is a tide in the affairs of men when taken at the flood leads to fortune.” Both Yanique and Capildeo have featured in the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature over the last few years, and both have attended the NCG Bocas Lit Fest, the annual literary festival. Publisher, Jeremy Poynting of Peepal Tree Press (publisher of Yanique’s book Wife and Capildeo’s Utter), sees the latest awards as part of a pattern.

“I don’t think the winning of the Forward Poetry prize by Caribbean writers for the last three years is any accident,” he said. “This is a generation for whom the fact of nationhood is history, who have distinguished elders to build on and react against, who see their writing in both a local and global setting, who are exploring all the actual diversities of being Caribbean persons in terms of race, gender and sexual orientation.” Pontying added, “What I hope, now, is that Caribbean leaders and readers begin to recognise the wealth of literary talent the region has and support it in the way that the Bocas Lit Fest and Calabash have been doing over the past half-dozen years.”