Please join us to celebrate the launch of Guaracara by Fawzia Muradali Kane.

The reading will be hosted by Carcanet poet Anthony Vahni Capildeo. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

Register here  and let us know you can make it by joining and sharing the Facebook listing.

This book traces the poet’s ancestral Indo-Caribbean legacy, following the history of the cane sugar industry, and growing up in an oil refinery small town in south Trinidad.

The ‘Guaracara’ opening section contains snapshot recollections of a childhood that witnessed the effect and damage caused by the refinery to land and workers. These memories of loss of people and place are woven into reflections as an adult who has moved to a new life, thousands of miles away, across the Atlantic.

The central long sequence ‘Let us mourn the death of King Sugar’, written in Trini Creole – the poet’s first language – consists of 13 Stations/poems where King Sugar charms then admonishes, and at times mocks, then falsely comforts canefield workers over three centuries.

The Stations shadow the profane arc of the cane sugar industry’s brutality of enslavement, through to indentureship’s deceitful transportation, to end with a sudden shut-down in Trinidad & Tobago due to political and commercial reasons.

The final sequence ‘Ancestral Coda’ links the poet’s family oral histories passed down through the generations, intertwined with her own experience as witness to family rituals of more recent bereavements.

About the speakers:

Fawzia Muradali Kane is an architect and poet. Born in San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago, she came to the UK on a scholarship to study architecture. She now lives in London and is a director of KMK Architects. Her debut poetry collection Tantie Diablesse (Waterloo Press 2011) was longlisted for the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. In 2014, Thamesis Publications produced her long sequence Houses of the Dead as an illustrated pamphlet. Her short story ‘Anguilla City’ was the 2018 City of Stories winner for Westminster in London. Her prose poem ‘Eric’ won second prize in 2023’s National Poetry Competition.

Anthony V. Capildeo FRSL is a Trinidadian Scottish writer of poetry and non-fiction. Currently Professor and Writer in Residence at the University of York, their site-specific word and visual art includes responses to Cornwall’s former capital, Launceston, as the Causley Trust Poet in Residence (2022) and to the Ubatuba granite of the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds (2023), as well as to Scottish, Irish, and Caribbean built and natural environments. Their numerous books and pamphlets, from No Traveller Returns (Salt, 2003), Person Animal Figure (Landfill, 2005) onwards, are distinguished by deliberate engagement with independent and small presses. Their work has been recognized with the Cholmondeley Award (Society of Authors) and the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection. Their publications include Like a Tree, Walking (Carcanet, 2021) (Poetry Book Society Choice), and A Happiness (Intergraphia, 2022). Their interests include silence, translation theory, medieval reworkings, plurilingualism, collaborative work, and traditional masquerade. Recent commissions include research-based Windrush poems for Poet in the City and for the Royal Society of Literature. Capildeo served as a judge for the Jhalak Prize (2023).