Ca­lyp­so Rose, 78, must find room again in her tro­phy cab­i­net for yet an­oth­er in­ter­na­tion­al award.
The hold­er of this coun­try's high­est award, the Or­der of the Re­pub­lic of Trinidad and To­ba­go, is to be award­ed the Grand Prize for World Mu­sic at the Sacem Grand Prix in France in De­cem­ber this year.
She is among a list of awardees that in­cludes Eng­lish song­writer Ed Sheer­an, in an event that will cel­e­brate the out­stand­ing in song­writ­ing, mu­sic pub­lish­ing, hu­mour and clas­si­cal con­tem­po­rary mu­sic at Salle Pleyel on the evening of Mon­day 10 De­cem­ber.
The Sacem Grands Prix are mu­si­cal awards giv­en an­nu­al­ly to pro­fes­sion­als in the world of mu­sic by the So­ci­ety of Au­thors, Com­posers and Mu­sic Pub­lish­ers (Sacem).
They give rise to an an­nu­al awards cer­e­mo­ny, which has been held since 2006.
Ca­lyp­so Rose, whose re­al name is Mc­Cartha Lin­da Sandy-Lewis, is no stranger to win­ning top in­ter­na­tion­al awards.
The vet­er­an ca­lyp­son­ian won the World Al­bum of the Year award at the Vic­toire de la Musique award cer­e­mo­ny in France in 2017.
The award is con­sid­ered the French equiv­a­lent of a Gram­my award.
Rose's al­bum, Far from Home, com­pet­ed against rock group Acid Arab with their al­bum "Mu­sic of France" and Rokia Tra­ore with her al­bum "Born So."
Far From home, the plat­inum-sell­ing al­bum was re­leased on the Be­cause Mu­sic la­bel on June 3, 2016.
Ca­lyp­so Rose was al­so award­ed the 2016 Artist Award by the World Mu­sic Ex­po (WOM­EX).
She topped artists from 95 coun­tries in re­ceiv­ing the pres­ti­gious award.
WOM­EX is an in­ter­na­tion­al net­work­ing plat­form for the world mu­sic in­dus­try.
The Artist Award is the top award giv­en out at the WOM­EX event.
It had nev­er been won by a Trinidad and To­ba­go cit­i­zen be­fore.
In 1975, the To­ba­go-born ca­lyp­son­ian won her first na­tion­al award, the Pub­lic Ser­vice Medal of Mer­it (Sil­ver).
Some 15 years lat­er in 2000, Rose won the Hum­ming Bird Medal (Gold).
In 2017 she won the high­est award the na­tion can of­fer. Source:  Trinidad Guardian

The highly anticipated World Premiere and Official Launch of Frances-Anne Solomon’s feature film, “Hero: Inspired by The Extraordinary Life and Times of Mr. Ulric Cross,” will be as the Opening Film at Trinidad and Tobago’s prestigious Film Festival, on September 18, 2018 at NAPA, in Port of Spain, Trinidad.
Republic Bank is the Title Sponsor for HERO — a Tall Caribbean Tale about a young man from Trinidad who, in 1941, leaves home to enlist in World War Two.  Miraculously, he survives the bloody carnage to become the RAF’s most decorated West Indian. Then his life takes another surprising turn and he finds himself at the centre of a remarkable historical moment.  Cross’ long life spanned key events of the 20th century and included the independence struggles of Africa and the Caribbean.
The international cast includes top screen stars from the Caribbean, the UK, Ghana and Canada including Trinidad’s Nickolai Salcedo in the lead role of Ulric Cross; Canada’s Peter Williams (Stargate-SG1); the UK’s Joseph Marcell, (Fresh Prince of Belair), Jimmy Akingbola (In The Long Run), Pippa Nixon (Panic), Fraser James (Resident Evil) and Eric Kofi Abrefa (Julie);  Ghanaian superstars John Dumelo and Adjetey Anang; and featuring cameos by well-known East Enders star Rudolph Walker and Nollywood star O.C. Ukeje.
Following the screening in Trinidad, Director Frances-Anne Solomon, Executive Producer Lisa Wickham and Nickolai Salcedo will be among those in attendance.
Ulric Cross (1917-2013) was a Trinidadian war hero, broadcaster, lawyer, judge and diplomat.  “The film draws on events in Ulric‘s life to recount a hitherto untold story of those Caribbean professionals who helped to liberate Africa from colonialism. Not only is the story inspired by his life, it recreates the dynamic and transformative times in which he lived. Because of Ulric’s significance as a diplomat and high-level government advisor during often turbulent times in post-independent Africa, many details of the role he played in these African countries had to be kept confidential — and this remains so today. Thus, several events have been extrapolated and dramatized,” said Frances-Anne Solomon, the film’s Director and Producer. “Ultimately, the story is about us, about who we are as Caribbean people, and as citizens of the world,”
The 100-minute feature film combines archive of the time with dramatizations inspired by events in Ulric Cross’ life, and was filmed over three years on location in Ghana, Great Britain and Canada, as well as in Trinidad & Tobago.
Sponsors and Partners supporting the film include Presenting Sponsor, Republic Bank, in association with Telefilm Canada, CaribbeanTales Worldwide Distribution, and Imagine Media International.
Source: Caribbean Posh, August 2018

Read the full article here 

Author : Historian ANGELO BISSESSARSINGH.
In the series of articles, " FROM THE PEN OF NAIPAUL" written by Local Historian Angelo Bissessarsingh an attempt is made to put into perspective, the world of Naipaul as he made his homeland famous through his works. This article and the ones to follow are VMOTT's tribute to a famous son of the soil " Sir Vidia Naipaul " .
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Sir Vidia's Naipaul father,Seepersad Naipaul died quite suddenly in 1953. An unobtrusive man with a penchant for written drama he spent years as a correspondent for the Trinidad Guardian Newspaper, after contributing his first article in 1929. His desire to write evocative stories set in the world that he knew saw no fruit until these sketches were published long after his demise.
Seepersad Naipaul might have spent his life in relative obscurity but for one posthumous event. In 1961, his son, then a moderately successful novelist, Oxford-educated and living in England penned one of the great works of modern literature. A House for Mr Biswas stands immortally from the genius of Seepersad’s son, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul as one of the outstanding literary works of our time.
Based largely upon his father’s biography, Sir Vidia took the seemingly hapless, tragic hero, Mohun Biswas and created a new Odysseus. Long considered by critics to be the finest living writer of the English sentence, Sir Vidia to those of us who have been exceedingly fortunate to have met him is interchangeably supercilious, disdainful, engaging, acerbic or simply nonchalant.
He distances himself from his Trinidadian roots and has long been loath to reconnect to the landscapes of his early novels which show that in spite of his denial, Sir Vidia is indelibly a son of our soil.
From 1957 until 1961 and then again in 1967 with A Flag on the Island, he has shown us how deeply he grasped the nuances of being born and raised in the society that at once clung to its somewhat prejudiced identities while attempting to forge ahead in a changing environment that would trade the long-cherished mores of colonialism for something of a different stripe.
The books which earned Sir Vidia's his fame are familiar to many schoolchildren today—The Mystic Masseur, The Suffrage of Elvira, the ever-delightful Miguel Street and A House for Mr Biswas—are all stories which have overlapping elements. The NGO founded by Prof Kenneth Ramchand, Friends of Mr Biswas is the custodian of all things Naipaul, situated as it is in the home Seepersad bought in St James and here is where the spiritual nexus can be felt most intensely.
It was a time of war and Trinidad was being turned upside down by the arrival of thousands of American soldiers who brought chaos in their wake. These books show a life before, during and after the Yankees came. Who could forget Edward, Hat’s brother of Miguel Street, who was the archetypal Trini young-blood of the period falling under the American spell:
“Edward surrendered completely to the Americans. He began wearing clothes in the American style, he began chewing gum, and he tried to talk with an American accent. We didn’t see much of him except on Sundays, and then he made us feel small and inferior. He grew fussy about his dress, and he began wearing a gold chain around his neck. He began wearing straps around his wrists, after the fashion of tennis-players. These straps were just becoming fashionable among smart young men in Port of Spain.”
In continuing the theme of constant paradigm change, The Suffrage of Elvira comically assesses the ground level impact of electoral politics during its infancy in postwar Trinidad. This book was serialized some years ago by the Trinidad Guardian and was a hit, introducing a new generation of readers to a scenario that at once had shades of déjà vu—“Elvira, you is a bitch!”.
The rich descriptiveness of Trinidad enshrined in "A House for Mr Biswas" and "The Mystic Masseur" provides at once a kaleidoscope into the period as well as the sundry historical characters made memorable by the master writer himself. Sir Vidia’s eyes for detail opens a spectrum to us which only our senior citizens can remember with any clarity.
Scanning some old newspapers a couple of years ago, I became indelibly aware of just how connected the Nobel Laureate Naipaul had been to Trinidad and in spite of his rejection of the place of his birth, he exhibits a keen understanding of the place and its people. Thus, over the next weeks, we will learn that ‘Red Rose Tea is Good Tea’, be dosed on Sanatogen and live in the Trinidad of Naipaul.

Veteran broadcaster June Gonsalves has passed away at the age of 91.
She died at her Anderson Terrace, Maraval home on Friday evening.
Gonsalves, the widow of the late national goalkeeper Joey Gonzales, leaves to mourn her two children, Teresa and Gerard. 
She suffered from Alzheimer's disease for the last seven years.
Gonsalves joined Radio Trinidad in 1956 and has the distinction of being the first female programme director of a Trinidadian radio station, a post she took up in 1964.
She resigned in 1970 and served as secretary to the late Archbishop Anthony Pantin until his death in 2000. That same year, she became the first Trinbagonian woman to be named a Dame Commander of the Order of St Gregory the Great.
She also hosted a number of programmes, including a Catholic religious programme, “The Catholic Forum of the Air.

Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley has extended condolences to the family of novelist and Nobel Laureate, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, who died Saturday at his home in Britain, six days shy of his 86th birthday.
“This proud son of T&T established himself as an icon in the literary arts on the global stage and his world-renowned achievements caused his birthplace to shine in a positive light,” he said in a statement issued shortly after news of Naipaul’s death.
Rowley said the Nobel Laureate was “unwavering in his resolve to tell his stories as he saw fit. Moreover, his strength of character was responsible in no small part for his renowned success.
“His literary works will always remain a testimony of his strength and amazing talent as well as ensure that he will never be forgotten. May he rest in peace,” Rowley said.
Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar described Sir Vidia’s works as inspiring and uplifting.
“For people of my generation, the children of the post-Colonial society that was Trinidad and Tobago, a society and people struggling to find and assume our identity after centuries of being ruled as marginal addendums to a social, economic and political framework that previously treated us as merely tolerated outcasts, Sir Vidia’s work was inspiring and uplifting.
“Like so many of my local and regional contemporaries, I would have been raised on books from Europe and England which described and deified people, cultures and civilisations that essentially reflected all that I could never be, until, as teenager and young adult I read Miguel Street, The Mystic Masseur and A House for Mr Biswas.
“And it was in these works, still so dear and personal to me, as they also are undoubtedly to many other of my countrymen and women, that Sir Vidia’s greatest contribution to my country and the world became not only clear, but inspiring in the greatest possible way,” Persad-Bissessar said.
His widow, Lady Naipaul who described Sir Vidia as “a giant in all that he achieved” said he died “surrounded by those he loved having lived a life which was full of wonderful creativity and endeavour.”
Locally, people took to social media to post their tributes to Sir Vidia.
Columnist Ira Mathur shared a photo of her son at an event with the Nobel Laureate during his 2008 visit to T&T and wrote on Twitter: “I heard of his death in the middle of a family celebration. Something shattered in me. The greatest writer in the English Language dead at 85. #Walcott, now him. #CaribbeanLiterature. Thank you for the words #SirVidia.”
On Facebook, Nigel A Campbell recalled his encounter with the renown writer:
“The UWI SPEC hall was ram, and all I thinking was, ‘if I don’t get up early to join that line, he might only sign a few books and leave.’ So you could imagine the scramble when his readings were over, and the announcement was made to form a line for signings. So here I was in the line with my ratty copy of the first American edition of his first novel, The Mystic Masseur. (US$5 on eBay in 2001. Some people don’t value “old books”) I nearly left the book in my car thinking that he wouldn’t want to sign an old book.
(My pal Afra and his mother said, ‘nah bring it.’)
“So you could imagine my horror when Vidia wife, Nadira, grab the microphone and said, ‘Sir Vidia won’t be signing old books, only new books purchased at the event.
“At this point, I was three from the front of the line. Someone earlier handed him random pieces of paper to sign so they could have his signature. He get vex or she get vex, I ain’t know who to blame now.
“I turned to my right, and his agent Gillon Aitken standing next to me, watched me dead in my eye and said, ‘don’t worry, he will sign that.’
“Aitken shepherded my book to the author. I smile inside.
“We reach the man, he flip it, he turn it back to front. He said, ‘I haven’t seen this in a long time.’ He glanced at me. He was not impressed, I guess, as he said nothing to me.
“He signed it quickly and pushed it aside and looked to the next person in line. I was still rambling to him, “thanks for your presence, for your writing,” but he moved on.
“Now that he is gone, my $5 investment has taken on a new significance. An encounter that lasted all of 30 seconds maximum is now an heirloom. (My daughter likes to write.) Thank you, Sir Vidia. RIP.”
Sir Vidia, who was born in Chaguanas on August 17, 1932, wrote more than 30 books, won the Booker Prize in 1971 and the Nobel Prize in literature in 2001, following the late St Lucian Derek Walcott who won the award in 1992.
The Nobel Prize in literature committee awarded Sir Vidia for “having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.
“Naipaul is a modern philosopher. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony,” it added.
Sir Vidia, who as a child was read Shakespeare and Dickens by his father, was raised a Hindu and attended Queen’s Royal College in Trinidad. He moved to Britain and enrolled at Oxford University in 1950 after winning a government scholarship.
His first book, The Mystic Masseur, was published in 1951 and a decade later he published his most celebrated novel, A House for Mr Biswas, which took over three years to write.
The editor of the Mail on Sunday, Geordie Greig, a close friend of Sir Vidia, said his death leaves a “gaping hole in Britain’s literary heritage” but there is “no doubt” that his “books live on”.
His first wife, Patricia Hale, died in 1996 and he went on to marry Pakistani journalist, Nadira. Source: The Guardian

Full Circle Animation Studios, a Trincity-based design studio, is making waves internationally.
Just recently, the company completed work on Season Three of the popular HBO animated series—Animals—which features guest appearances by celebrity actors and performers RuPaul Charles, Usher, Aziz Ansari, Wanda Sykes and Raven-Symone.
The series is an American animated comedy created by Phil Matarese and Mike Luciano.
The first two episodes were independently produced and presented at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2015.In May 2015, HBO picked the series up with a two-season order, which premiered on February 5, 2016.
The series was renewed for a third season on May 19th, 2017.
Full Circle’s managing director Jason Lindsay told Express Business last week that in November last year, the company was contracted by Big Jump Entertainment in Ottawa, Canada to produce the animation for the HBO series, which premieres on August 3 2018.
He described the partnership as a major accomplishment, not only for Full Circle but for the local animation industry.
This is the first time that an animation studio from Trinidad and or the Caribbean has been contracted by an international studio for a full season of a TV show on a major network he noted.
He said the contract with Big Jump will open doors for Full Circle, given that Big Jump is one of the main production studios in Canada.“It’s a company we had always admired and looked forward to working with. I believe that post-airing, we will get a lot of visibility and we will be able to add to our showreel. It will not doubt create other opportunities outside of that relationship.”
(A showreel is a short piece of video or film footage showcasing an actor or presenter’s previous work.
Source:  Full Circle Animation, August 10, 2018

An animation studio from Trinidad and Tobago has produced the animation for an HBO series featuring performances from RuPaul, Aziz Ansari, Wanda Sykes, Raven-Symone and Usher, among others.
Season three of Animals will premiere on August 3.
Full Circle Animation Studio was recently contracted by Big Jump Entertainment in Ottawa Canada to produce the animation for the HBO series.
A release said the show is considered to be one of the funniest, most idiosyncratic shows on television.
An in-house team of 12 people (nine animators, one animation supervisor, one project coordinator, and one project manager) worked tirelessly between December 2017 and May 2018 at the studio located in Trincity.
“This show had a very unique and distinctive style of design and animation. It looks simple and minimalist but it required us to transmit a lot of emotion through the characters using very limited animation movement. Going in, we had otherwise underestimated how challenging that could be while keeping the provocative edge that really defines the style of the show. In that regard, it was a new technical experience for us," said Managing Director Jason Lindsay.
This is the first time that an animation studio in Trinidad or throughout the Caribbean has been contracted from an international studio for a full season of a TV show on a major network.
“For a young animation industry like ours here in Trinidad, the main long-term benefit of an opportunity like this is the investment in our human resource. The experience and technical/creative insight gained from our animators working with an experienced production studio like Big Jump Entertainment are invaluable. The entire team benefited from it tremendously," Lindsay said. 
The release said that projects like this and other overseas productions outsourced to Full Circle puts the company in a position where over the last three years, over 50 percent of its income has been from foreign exchange revenue, with this most recent project catapulting its export earnings for the first half of 2018 to over 90 percent of its income during that period – a very unique position for any small business in general to be in but a major achievement for the studio and the industry as a whole.
Lindsay pointed out the role that institutions have played in various capacities in getting the studio to this point in its growth. Organisations like ExporTT has given tremendous support in positioning the studio for export and continues to support the animation industry as a whole. InvesTT planted the seeds that spawned this growth through guidance, support, and exposure to position the studio for opportunity and success. Though there is still a lot to be done the studio is well on its way with this landmark achievement on the journey, he stated.
The release said that this accomplishment exemplifies how the Government, the education sector, and enterprise can work hand in hand to achieve and change the landscape of the economy. 
The release said below the surface of this model is the seamless education thread that few are aware of and appreciate.  Students from the YTEPP Animation Retraining Programme, went on to complete the UTT Diploma in Animation programme and now 90 percent of the workforce is part of that thread that makes up the studio.  
“This is a great example of success in creative sector and seamless education in a country that depends on Oil and Gas. Programme Coordinator for animation Studies at the University of Trinidad and Tobago Camille Abrahams said.
Season 3 of the HBO animated series ANIMALS will premiere on August 3.

A tale written in Trinidadian Creole that was inspired by the true story of a family who cremated a baby in the wilds of the island, has been plucked from more than 5,000 entries to win the Commonwealth short story prize.
In Passage, Kevin Jared Hosein writes of a man who hears a story in a bar about a family living away from society, and sets out to find them. “A man is so small in the wilderness, believe me. The way how people is now, we ain’t tailored to live there. So when Stew say he stumble across a house in the middle of the mountain, my ears prick up. I take in every word as he describe it. A daub and wattle house in the middle of a clearing, walls slabbed with sticks and clay and dung and straw, topped with a thatch roof,” writes Hosein, in Trinidadian English Creole, a choice he had initially thought would put people off.
“Originally I was afraid – I didn’t think people would understand the Creole,” the Trinidadian author told the Guardian. But the novelist Sarah Hall, who chaired the award jury, said Passage was “immediately and uniformly admired by the judges”.
“It balances between formal language and demotic, ideas of civility and ferality, is tightly woven and suspenseful, beautifully and eerily atmospheric, and finally surprising,” said Hall. “It is, in essence, all a reader could want from the short story form; a truly crafted piece of fiction that transports the reader into another world, upends expectations, and questions the nature of narratives and narrative consequence.”
The annual prize is awarded to the best piece of unpublished short fiction from the Commonwealth. Stories can be submitted in Bengali, Chinese, English, Malay, Portuguese, Samoan, Swahili, and Tamil, with 5,182 stories entered from 48 countries this year.
Hosein, who received his £5,000 award in Cyprus on Wednesday night, first learned about the true story behind Passage when he was 15. “People were aware there was a family living along a trail – they had older living customs that wouldn’t be acceptable today. Their baby died, and they had a custom to send its spirit off by cremating the body. That is what drew attention to them, and the two parents were put in an asylum, and the older children into a foster home,” he said.
“The last thing on the news was that when the children were brought into society and saw a television, they couldn’t stop screaming. I remember it hanging in my head as a child for a long time. People just wrote it off as madness, but I thought it had more to it than that and I wanted to explore it.”
AdvertisementA science teacher as well as a writer, Hosein was a Caribbean regional winner for the Commonwealth prize in 2015. “Winning in 2015 was pure validation – I didn’t really put my writing out there before that,” he said. “But just the fact that I made it on to the shortlist told me that my work could resonate with people outside my region. You always have that doubt: ‘Am I really good?’”
This time, “I just felt pride – not just in me but in my country … There is not much opportunity in the Caribbean to make a name for yourself. I think the prize has helped with that,” he said.
Hosein is the author of three novels: The Beast of Kukuyo, which won him the Burt award for Caribbean literature, The Repenters, which was shortlisted for the Bocas prize, and Littletown Secrets.

TT’s Jennifer Rahim is the winner of the 2018 OCM (One Caribbean Media) Bocas prize for Caribbean Literature.
Rahim was announced the winner during a ceremony, one of the highlights of the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, last night at the Old Fire Station in Port of Spain. She was also awarded US$10,000.
In a press release, Bocas stated that the judges’ choice was between Rahim’s collection of short stories, Curfew Chronicles, and Madwoman by Jamaican Shara McCallum. As poetry winner, McCallum received an award of US$3,000.
It said Curfew Chronicles was a series of linked short stories featuring characters from all levels of society, unfolding over a 24 hour period during a fictionalised version of the 2011 state of emergency.
“This must surely rank as one of the most ambitious books ever attempted by a Caribbean writer. The philosophical, moral and religious themes and ideas put forward about community in all its many manifestations are lightly, deftly handled... Readers are rewarded by moments of sheer grace; and numinous revelations at every turn,” said Lorna Goodison, chief judge of the prize.
Rahim is a widely published poet, fiction writer, and literary critic. She published a book of short fiction, Songster and Other Stories in 2007, and a collection of poetry, Approaching Sabbaths, in 2009. Approaching Sabbaths was awarded a 2010 Casa de las Américas Prize.
Source:  T&T Newsday April 29, 2018.