OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature

The overall winner of the 2026 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature is The Snag: A Mother, a Forest, and Wild Grief, by Tessa McWatt.

The announcement was made on 2 May during the 2026 Bocas Lit Fest in Port of Spain.

The overall winner receives a cash award of US$10,000 sponsored by One Caribbean Media. The other genre category winners each receive US$3,000.

The judges for the Prize previously announced the winners in the three genre categories:

POETRY
The World After Rain: Anne’s Poem, by Canisia Lubrin (McClelland & Stewart)

FICTION
Ibis, by Justin Haynes (Overlook Press)

NONFICTION
The Snag: A Mother, a Forest, and Wild Grief, by Tessa McWatt (Random House Canada/Scribe UK)

The shortlists in the three genre categories were announced on 1 March, 2026:

POETRY

• Heirloom, by Catherine-Esther Cowie (Carcanet Press)
• Dante’s Inferno, by Lorna Goodison (Carcanet Press)
• The World After Rain: Anne’s Poem, by Canisia Lubrin (McClelland & Stewart)
• Ground Provisions, by Shauna M. Morgan (Peepal Tree Press)
• The Boy Kingdom, by Achy Obejas (Beacon Press)

FICTION

• Tall Is Her Body, by Robert de la Chevotière (Erewhon Books)
• The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive: being dreamity, algoriddims, chants & riffs, by Marcia Douglas (New Directions)
• Ibis, by Justin Haynes (Overlook Press)
• Paradise Once, by Olive Senior (Akashic Books)
• A Different Hurricane, by H. Nigel Thomas (Dundurn Press)

NONFICTION

• The Possibility of Tenderness: A Jamaican Memoir of Plants and Dreams, by Jason Allen-Paisant (Hutchinson Heinemann)
• A Sense of Arrival, by Kevin Adonis Browne (Duke University Press)
• Silence and Resistance: Memoir of a Girlhood in Haiti, by Monique Clesca (Riverchild Literary Press)
• The Snag: A Mother, a Forest, and Wild Grief, by Tessa McWatt (Random House Canada/Scribe UK)
• Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival, by Maria Pinto (University of North Carolina Press)

Learn more about the shortlisted books here.