Richard Georges
Richard Georges is the founding editor of Moko Magazine. His poetry has appeared in The Poetry Review, The White Review, WILDNESS, Wasafiri and elsewhere. He is the author of the poetry collections Make Us All Islands (Shearsman, 2017), Giant (Platypus, 2018) and Epiphaneia (Out-Spoken Press 2020). Epiphaneia won the 2020 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.
In 2016 he won the Marvin Williams Literary Prize from The Caribbean Writer and has since been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and won the OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry. Richard was born in Trinidad and raised in the British Virgin Islands where he lives and works today. He was appointed Poet Laureate of the British Virgin Islands in 2020.
WINNER of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature 2020
‘They say birds always find their way back home but home is a nowhere — a memory; a never was.’
Set in the immediate aftermath of 2017’s Hurricane Irma, the most catastrophic storm to strike the British Virgin Islands, Richard Georges’ Epiphaneia stands as a collection of rich, transcendental verse. Beyond the loss and devastation that such a natural disaster brings, Georges’ ideas span beyond the physical world, asking us to consider the ways in which families and communities come together amidst such tragedy.
Blood runs under the earth. A father will instruct his daughter to the hills where their ancestors are buried. A flying man opens a door in the sky. Children play in the twisted roots of a landscape both dangerous and triumphant. Constantly attuned to the devastating power of nature and where the body, too, is ‘a precarious house’, these poems are hymns to the resilience of the human spirit. Georges locates in the negative space of aftermath both the ghosts of history, and the mythic beginnings of a yet unlived, rejuvenated world.