Welcome to Ira’s Room

Creative writing is almost the opposite of the frenetic world of journalism rooted solidly in facts, time and space. Creative writing is about mining your most essential self. As Virginia Woolf said, "It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes makes its way to the surface."

My first memory is my grandmother reading me Arabian nights on a rainy day in Bangalore watching the leaves of her roses fall, and the mango tree outside thrash about. I never wanted her voice to stop or the story to end. My mother gave me a copy of Jane Austen's Emma when I was eight with the inscription "Be good, sweet maid and let your beauty shine." I was neither good nor beautiful, nor was I particularly academic, but she set me on the trail of devouring the world through books in a wildly haphazard way. As a child, I was reading everything from comics depicting great characters from the Ramayana to the twee Enid Blyton blissfully unaware of the racism her books now evoke. Books transported, comforted, elevated me. One cold Christmas I spent alone in London living near the train lines or on trains I discovered Virginia Woolf's 'The Waves' and that branched out into a lifetime of reading everything from the Bloomsbury group. I read through contractions in childbirth, while breastfeeding, waiting for my brothers' cancer diagnosis, waiting in thousands of lines for though a lifetime of chores. I've been writing a diary since I was nine or ten and have never stopped. 

I wrote my first piece for Trinidad Guardian at 17 when the late great editor of the Trinidad Guardian, Carl Jacobs accepted an article I wrote about my cheap European student travel. That's how my newspaper writing began. I have written a column week after week for decades, after deaths, and weddings, while holding babies, and in basements, in planes and cars, on the street, and the floor. Writing to me today, is like breathing.

Why do we write? When Douglas Stewart won the Booker prize for his novel Shuggie Bain, he said his book growing up as a young gay boy in Glasgow with an alcoholic mother was cathartic. It helped him heal.  

We write to process trauma and beauty, to hold it, to feel the range of human experience.

My creative writing has followed a wilder trajectory. On the day of 9/11 I was in London when an agent from Little, Brown Company,  Jane Bradish-Ellames (who has since left the business) phoned me. She had got my number from The Guardian (UK) after she’s read a piece I wrote about my family and asked if I would like to write a memoir. I clearly wasn’t ready.

It was only in 2016 after I spent a weekend with the late Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott and his gracious partner Sigrid Nama that under his questioning that chipped away at my defences, I was able to be authentic, so the veils flew off one by one, and I began writing the way Tolstoy said writers should, with the flesh coming off with the ink, with truth and pain. 

 I took a year off journalism, and in In 2015 and 2016 I completed diplomas in creative writing with the University of East Anglia/Guardian with James Scudamore and Gillian Slovo, and a further six-month creative writing course with Faber and Faber with Maggie Gee. 

Back home in Trinidad, I joined an entire generation of writers and thinkers that owe Marina Salandy Brown, the founder of The Trinidad & Tobago Bocas Literary Festival, now elected an Honorary Fellow of the United Kingdom's Royal Society of Literature as an honorary fellow a vast debt of gratitude for developing a globally respected literary festival in Trinidad.

Bocas Lit Fest opened doors for Caribbean artists, thinkers, poets, academics, intellectuals, writers, and politicians to connect with one another and the literary world, just as the Peepal Tree press continued to publish excellent writing in the Caribbean. This twin support has supported an entire new generation of writers in the Caribbean.

From Clare Adam, (Golden Child) to Ayanna Gillian Lloyd (The Gatekeepers); from Monique Roffey and Ingrid Persaud (both shortlisted for the Costa prize) to non-fiction writer and memoirist Judy Raymond; From Breanne McIvor to Caroline Mackenzie (picked up by Netflix). From Amanda Smyth to Shivanne Ramlochan (shortlisted for the Forward Prize) to the celebrated Vahni Capildeo (winner of the Forward Prize). From Alake Pilgrim to Gilbert O'Sullivan, a new generation of women writers has carved a large niche in the formerly male-dominated canon of the herculean canon of Caribbean literature. They are joining the voices of Nobel Laureates Derek Walcott and VS Naipaul, CLR James, Earl Lovelace, Sam Selvon, and more recently, brilliant writers and poets including Jacob Ross, (Topping Sunday Times, and The Guardian Best Crime thrillers of 2020) Vladimir Lucien (OCM Bocas Prize for Literature) and Marlon James (Booker prize).

I wrote my own first short story, Poui Season after moderating a session with Ingrid Persad for winning the Commonwealth Prize and Celeste Mohammed for the Penn award.

Poui Season won second prize in for the Caribbean based 'Small Axe Journal Competition (published in The Caribbean Journal of Criticism).

Encouraged by this I wrote six more stories one another the other and was shortlisted for the Bridport Short Story Prize and the Lorian Hemmingway Prizes (short story) in 2018.

As I continued to work on a memoir, in 2019, I have longlisted for the Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Emerging Writers Prize an excerpt of which is anthologised in Thicker Than Water, Peekash Press, 2018.

Now agented, I hope the memoir finds a place in Caribbean writing.