Witchbroom

Witchbroom is a visionary history of a Caribbean Spanish/French Creole family and an island over four centuries – to 20th-century independence. With an innovative tone and content, its carnival tales of crime and passion are told by the narrator Lavren, who is both male and female. First published in 1992, Witchbroom is a Caribbean classic. The following year it became a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime, broadcast over eight nights and read by the author. It was shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best First Book. A pioneering work, it heralded a new generation of modernist Caribbean writers who, like Scott, broke away from a predominantly realist literary tradition; Witchbroom identifies more with magic realism. A richly entertaining and many layered read, its hermaphrodite narrator brings a contemporary flavour to the novel. The title Witchbroom refers to a fungus that attacks cocoa trees, and is also used as a metaphor for the decline of the island's plantocracy.

Lawrence Scott is an award-winning Caribbean novelist and short-story writer from Trinidad & Tobago. His first novel Witchbroom (1992, and reissued by Papillote Press in 2017) was a BBC Book at Bedtime, while his second novel, Aelred's Sin, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book for Canada and the Caribbean in 1999. He is the winner of the Tom-Gallon Trust short-story award. 'Light Falling on Bamboo' (2012) received an honourable mention from Casa de las Americas prize, Cuba, 2014; longlisted for the International Impac Dublin literary award, 2014; shortlisted for the OCM BOCAS prize fiction category. His short story collection, Leaving by Plane Swimming back Underwater was published (Papillote Press) in 2016. His non-fiction work includes Golconda: Our Voices Our Lives, the result of an oral history project featuring the lives of a community on a sugar estate in Trinidad. He became a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2019. He lives and works in London and Port of Spain, Trinidad.