Tag Archives: Lisa Allen-Agostini

Derek Walcott, Nobel Prize winner, once lamented: “Colonials, we began with this malarial enervation: that nothing could ever be built among these rotting shacks, barefooted backyards and moulting shingles; that being poor, we already had the theatre of our lives.”  Yet, he is at one with Chinua Achebe, the towering …

When the Pandemic started and the world stopped, like everyone else, I was thrown into a whole new mental space. Unlike everyone else, I did not learn to bake banana bread or grow marijuana.  But in mid-2020, I did feel called to learn to sew—buying a basic Brother sewing machine …

The following is the full text of the brief address delivered by Lisa Allen-Agostini, chief judge for the 11-15 panel in the Write Start National Essay Writing Contest, at the prize-giving ceremony, held at the bMobile box at the Queen’s Park Oval on Thursday 16 December 2021. Also in attendance …

There was an unexpected touch of royalty at the inaugural Wired868 Write Start national essay writing prize-giving ceremony yesterday evening at the bmobile suite at the Queen’s Park Oval in St Clair.  Parvati Girls’ Hindu College student Shara Balkan won the 11-15 category with a fictional story about how her …

“[…] My whole dream was to be a writer and my parents—well, more specifically my dad—always crushed it. My dad wanted me to become a doctor, something ‘useful’.  “However I wanted to be a writer. The feeling I felt as I brought a tree or a meadow to life. I …

Got a teenager at home? Think (s)he has a novel or a short story nestling at the back of his/her head just waiting to get out? And what of teenagers in general? Agree that they have lost a lot of the skills that adolescents in your time had, including critical …