Shivanee Ramlochan is a Trinidadian poet, essayist, and critic. Her collection of poems, Everyone Knows I am a Haunting (Peepal Tree Press) was shortlisted for the 2018 Felix Dennis Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her second poetry collection, Witch Hindu, and her debut creative non-fiction book of essays, Unkillable, which focuses on Indo-Caribbean women’s disobedience, are both in development.
Shivanee has served as Book Reviews Editor of Caribbean Beat Magazine since 2012. She has worked for the Bocas Lit Fest, the Caribbean’s largest Anglophone literary festival, since its inception, and currently serves as Festival and Programme Manager. Shivanee is Social Media and Events Manager for Paper Based Bookshop, Trinidad and Tobago’s sole Caribbean specialty bookseller. She was Chief Guest Editor for Susumba’s Book Bag Issue 10: Natural Disasters in Our Caribbean / Queer & LGBT Caribbean Lit, and has served on adjudication and editorial panels for Commonwealth Writers’ adda; Honeysuckle Press; The Forward Prizes; The Caribbean Review of Books, Discover T&T, and others. Currently, she serves as Translation Selector for the Poetry Book Society.
She is the Co-Editor, alongside Lucy Evans, of the forthcoming Peekash Press anthology, Unstitching Silence: Fiction and Poetry by Caribbean Writers on Gender-Based Violence (2024). Shivanee is also a fellow of the Cropper Foundation Residential Writers’ Workshop in 2010.
Editorial Statement
It is devastating to do this work in the wake of Funso Aiyejina’s death, but that does not mean we’re working on Writing For Our Lives without him. His legacy, in The Cropper Foundation as in so many other walks of his creative and professional life, remains unkillable. It moves me, deeply and beyond easy speech, to now be co-editing this anthology of climate justice alongside Diana McCaulay, one of our region’s brightest, most indefatigable environmental activists and writers. Funso, too, approved of Diana’s work, and the ways in which she did it — this, to me, is the ultimate seal of approval. I remain hopeful and committed to the vision of this book, and radically thankful to all the writers who will become a part of it. We’ve never needed it more.
Website: https://shivaneeramlochan.com/
Facebook: @shivanee.ramlochan
X (Twitter): @novelniche
Instagram: @novelniche
