NGC Bocas Lit Fest

The NGC Bocas Lit Fest is the Trinidad and Tobago literary festival that takes place annually during the last weekend of April in Port of Spain. Inaugurated in 2011,^[1] it is the first major literary festival in the southern Caribbean^[2] and largest literary festival in the Anglophone Caribbean.^[3][4][5] A registered non-profit company, the festival has as its title sponsor the National Gas Company of Trinidad and Tobago (NGC).^[6] Other sponsors and partners include First Citizens Bank, One Caribbean Media (OCM), who sponsor the associated OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, CODE (sponsors of the Burt Award), and the Commonwealth Foundation.^[7][8]

The NGC Bocas Lit Fest also works in collaboration with other international festivals and initiatives, and has hosted events showcasing Caribbean writing talent in New York,^[9] at the Brooklyn Book Fair,^[10][11] the Harlem Book Fair^[12][13] and elsewhere in the US. In 2012, Bocas partnered with the Edinburgh World Writers Conference as part of a lineup of 14 countries delivering a multinational series of talks marking the 50th anniversary of the five-day meeting of "an impressive, sensational and sometimes scandalous group of writers" at the first Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama.^[14] The Bocas Lit Fest was described by Claire Armitstead of The Guardian as "expansive in its cultural reach, reflecting a region that has responded to its own colonisation over the centuries by seeding its people to every continent".^[15]