So Many Islands: Stories from the Caribbean, Mediterranean, Indian, and Pacific Oceans

Collecting new fiction, essays, and poems from seventeen countries around the world, So Many Islands brings us stories about love and protest, about childhood innocence and the traumas of history, about leaving home and trying to return. These writers’s island homes may seem remote on the map, but there is nothing isolated about their compelling, fresh voices.

Featuring contributions by authors from Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Bermuda, Cyprus, Grenada, Jamaica, Kiribati, Malta, Mauritius, Niue, Rotuma (Fiji), Samoa, Singapore, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Tonga, and Trinidad and Tobago. So Many Islands is the fourth publication of Peekash Press, an imprint of Akashic Books and Peepal Tree Press, committed to supporting the emergence of new Caribbean writing, and as part of the CaribLit project.

From the introduction by Marlon James:

I wonder if it is because we island people are surrounded by sea, hemmed in and branching out at once, that we are always in a state of flux. The sea and even the sky are definers and confiners, they have spent millions of years carving space, while at the same time giving us clear openings to map the voyage out. And, today, to be an islander is to live in one place and a thousand, to be part of a family that is way too close by for your business ever to be your own, or way too far but only a remittance cheque away. Or, put another way, to be island people means to be both coming and going. Passing and running, running and passing, as the song goes. Living there, but not always present, travelling or migrating, but never leaving. Or what has never been a new thing, but might turn into a new movement: more and more authors staying put, all the better to let their words wander.

Nicholas Laughlin (Trinidad and Tobago) is the editor of the Caribbean Review of Books and the arts and travel magazine Caribbean Beat, and program director of the Bocas Lit Fest, an annual literature festival and literary development organization based in Trinidad. He is also codirector of the contemporary art space Alice Yard. His book of poems The Strange Years of My Life was published in 2015.

Nailah Folami Imoja (Barbados) is a Barbadian/British writer, performer, and educator. As a poet, novelist, and journalist, she has contributed significantly to the Barbadian litscape. She has performed her work in England, Canada, Suriname, Guyana, and Trinidad.