Quick links: my blog • some of my reviews and essays • my Flickr page


A brief encyclopedia entry might read like this:

Nicholas Laughlin (6 May, 1975–   ), writer and editor of The Caribbean Review of Books, was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He was educated at St. Mary’s College in Port of Spain and the University of the West Indies at St. Augustine. He is the former editor of the arts and culture magazine Caribbean Beat, and his reviews and essays have been published in various periodicals.


Some notes to flesh out the above, in case anyone’s interested (as of August 2007):

My professional career began when I was all of fifteen, when I started a holiday job at Sandpiper Ltd., probably the first desktop publishing firm in Trinidad and Tobago. At Sandpiper, under the guidance of my friend Mary Adam, I learned the rudiments of copy-editing and proofreading (as well as some basic design skills), I operated a big old Linotronic machine, and I was a keen assistant in the little bookshop, Folio Books, that occupied the ten-by-ten-foot room at the front of the office. • At UWI, where I read English, I managed to get myself elected president of the moribund campus literary society in order to found a very small magazine, Prometheus, which ran for about a year and a half. I also spent a great many hours in the main library reading outside my course lists. Despite a half-hearted attempt to drop out in my final year, I finally graduated with first class honours. • During my “year off” from UWI, I worked for a few months as a sub-editor at the Trinidad Guardian, and have had no desire to work at a newspaper ever since. I then found myself in the publications wing of a large advertising agency. When I’d had enough of that, I quit in order to head off and see the world, etc. I got as far as San Francisco before being summoned back to Trinidad to join the staff of Caribbean Beat. (I’d been a sort of freelance books editor for the magazine for a couple years before that.) • In 2003 I was made editor of Caribbean Beat, and began working on a revival of The Caribbean Review of Books. (In its original incarnation the CRB was published in Jamaica and edited by the late Samuel B. Bandara.) The first issue of the new CRB appeared in May 2004. • At the end of 2006, I started an indefinite sabbatical from Caribbean Beat in order to have more time for both the CRB and my own writing.

For the last two years, off and on, I’ve been working on a book about Guyana, tentatively titled “Imaginary Roads”.  When people ask what sort of book it is, I usually tell them if I knew that I’d be much closer to finishing it. I suppose it’s best described as a travel book, with elements of cultural history, autobiography, and maybe even fiction. So far I’ve written about thirty thousand words in aborted drafts. The last few months, I’ve been concentrating on reading and research. • In July 2007 I was appointed the Rex Nettleford Fellow in Cultural Studies by the Rhodes Trust. My Guyana book is the project I will work on during the year-long fellowship.

When I was an undergraduate at UWI, poking around in the library, I came across a series of essays written by C.L.R. James immediately after he left Trinidad for the United Kingdom, describing his first impressions of London. They were published in the Port of Spain Gazette in 1932 and then all but forgotten (only one of the essays was reprinted in book form). A few years later I edited and collected them in Letters from London (Prospect Press, 2003). • In early 2007, I began working on a second major editorial project: a revised and expanded edition of V.S. Naipaul’s Letters Between a Father and Son, to be published by Picador in 2008.  In January 2007 I visited the Naipaul archive at the University of Tulsa, where, apart from the correspondence files, I read the manuscript of The Enigma of Arrival.

In the last ten years I’ve written more book reviews, long and short, than I care to remember. They’ve been published in the Trinidad Guardian, the Trinidad and Tobago Review, Caribbean Beat, the Stabroek News, and the CRB. I’ve also  published profiles of writers, essays on various subjects, bits of reportage, and, more recently, pieces on contemporary art in the Caribbean. Choosing My Confessions is a sort of online anthology of all the above. • During the last year I’ve engaged in an informal collaboration with the artist Christopher Cozier around his series of drawings Tropical Night. My inconclusive reflections on the work will appear in a catalogue to be published by the Dartmouth College Studio Art Department in late 2007, and Chris and I have started a Tropical Night blog to exchange ideas and questions.

I started my personal weblog, blandly titled Nicholas Laughlin’s blog etc., in October 2002, as a sort of experiment that I suppose is still in progress. Back then I wrote: “I’m fascinated by the stream-of-consciousness possibilites of the blog form, though frankly I don’t expect many people will find my personal stream of consciousness particularly gripping.” Experience has shown that my expectations were more or less accurate. • In May 2007 I started Antilles, the CRB blog, where I post excerpts and outtakes from the magazine, Caribbean literary news, short essays and interviews, and self-indulgent lists. I also contribute infrequently to the Caribbean Beat blog, and have set up a very modest A.J. Seymour webpage. • In early 2006 I began contributing as a volunteer author to Global Voices, the web-based non-profit that “aggregates, curates, and amplifies the global conversation online” by promoting the efforts of citizen journalists. You can see my GV contributions at my author’s page. At the 2006 summit in Delhi, I met several dozen of my impressive, accomplished GV colleagues and was freshly inspired by the do-good possibilities of the WWW.

I was a member of the advisory team for Galvanize 2006, a six-week contemporary arts programme that ran in Port of Spain in September and October. I was particularly involved in organising two literary events—a reading of fiction and poems called “Monsters and Other Animals” and a discussion of the newspaper column as a literary medium, “News That Stays News”—and a jointpop performance, “Make a Holy Noise”. I also edited the Galvanize blog. There are efforts underway to make Galvanize a biennial event, with a second programme possibly scheduled for late 2008.

At my Flickr page you can see photos of many of my recent projects, activities, and travels. (Don’t miss the photoset from my mountain-climbing trip to Venezuela in March and April 2007.) What do I look like? Here’s a set of self-portraits. • What do I sound like? I’ve recorded a few podcasts with my friend Georgia Popplewell at Caribbean Free Radio. You can listen to me interviewing Jamaican writer Kei Miller, describing a visit to Yeats’s grave in Drumcliff, Co. Sligo, and rambling through a “soundseeing” tour of Mt. St. Benedict. Afterwards you may agree with me that I have a face for radio and a voice for print.

I like Susan Sontag’s idea of the writer as someone interested in “everything”. When it comes to the game of foxes and hedgehogs, I am decidedly a fox. But I’m trying to develop more hedgehogly habits.

Finally: que sais-je?