it’s equipped him with ways to think more capably and clearly about his writing. Some of the ecological detail in his Commonwealth prizewinning short story, “Passage”, was lifted directly from his degree, from his own walks on forest trails. “ Passage” is a remarkable story on many fronts. Told from the perspective of a dedicated forester who goes on an unlikely mountainous quest in Trinidad’s Northern Range, it simultaneously suggests a landscape victimised by the exploits of humans, alongside a world in which nature always, ruthlessly, has the final say. Hosein’s narrative was praised for its use of the demotic. Hosein himself seems bemused by the doggedness of this particular plaudit from non-<strong>Caribbean</strong> readers, critics, and publicists: it is, after all, how we people have been writing for generations, he says. It’s telling, he points out, of Hosein speaks at length about the handsome list of rejections he’s earned since starting to write. “No matter how good your writing is, you have to have a plan . . . a scheme” how woefully under-read the literary metropolis remains in a range of <strong>Caribbean</strong> voices, despite recent bookish success emanating from our region. This isn’t Hosein’s first rodeo with the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. He’s entered six times, from 2013 to <strong>2018</strong>. In 2015, his story “The King of Settlement 4” won the regional arm of the prize. The first story he ever entered, “The Monkey Trap”, was anthologised in Pepperpot: Best New Stories from the <strong>Caribbean</strong>, the debut publication of Peekash Press. Hosein, who speaks at length about the handsome list of rejections he’s earned since starting to write, quantifies these six years of entries, largely populated with misses, as part of a larger goal. “No matter how good your writing is, you have to have a plan . . . a scheme.” If "scheme" sounds like a slightly mercenary word, you should remember that this is a writer who earnestly gave great thought to sneaking into a literature degree. Still, it’s prudence, not pugilism, that’s the better part of Hosein’s endeavours in the world of writing. This dates back to his secondary school days, of showing his stories to his classmates, acquiring their feedback, and repeating the cycle. It was in form four, he says, that his work began to acquire an especially grim, menacing glint, layered with violence, tones of the macabre, and an arsenal of baleful sexual suggestion. 62 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
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