Mark McWatt – författare

The Caribbean has produced one of the most vigorous and exciting bodies of poetry of the last one hundred year. The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse is the only contemporary anthology to present the best of the English-language poetry of the region alongside selections from the poetry of both the French and Spanish Caribbean. Featuring a range of established poets from Derek Walcott to Jesus Cos Causse, Olive Senior to Aimé Césaire, as well as exciting new voices, this is a rich and challenging book.

Inspire students to enjoy poetry while helping them to prepare effectively for the CSEC® examination; ensure coverage of all prescribed poems for the revised CSEC® English A and English B syllabuses with an anthology that has been compiled with the approval of the Caribbean Examinations Council by Editors who have served as CSEC® English panel members.- Stimulate an interest in and enjoyment of poetry with a wide range of themes and subjects, a balance of well-known poems from the past and more recent works, as well as poems from the Caribbean and the rest of the world.- Support understanding with notes on each poem and questions to provoke discussion, and a useful checklist to help with poetry analysis.- Consolidate learning with practical guidance on how to tackle examination questions including examples of model answers for reference.

Inspire students to enjoy literature while helping them to prepare effectively for the CSEC® examination; ensure coverage of all prescribed poems for the revised CSEC® English A and English B syllabuses with an anthology that has been compiled with the approval of the Caribbean Examinations Council by Editors who have served as CSEC® English panel members.- Stimulate an interest in and enjoyment of literature with a wide range of themes and subjects, a balance of well-known texts from the past and more recent works, as well as stories from the Caribbean and the rest of the world.- Support understanding with notes on each text and questions to provoke discussion, and a useful checklist to help with literary analysis.- Consolidate learning with practical guidance on how to tackle examination questions including examples of model answers for reference.

A group of sixth formers vandalize an exclusive Georgetown club on the day of their school leaving, coincidentally also the day of their country's independence. Several of their parents think a lesson is in order and the semblance of a trial is organized. The sentences they are given are suspended provided that they fulfil the task set by their English teacher, who has interceded on their behalf. Each must write a short story that says something about the newly independent Guyana. Years later, Mark McWatt, one of the group, is handed the papers of his old school friend, Victor Nunes, who has disappeared, feared drowned, in the Guyanese interior. The papers contain some of the stories, written before the project collapsed when the group realized the trial was a hoax. As a tribute to Victor Nunes, McWatt decides to collect the rest of the stories from his friends. "Suspended Sentences" is a tour-de-force of invention. The stories, entertaining in their own right, whether supposedly written by eighteen year olds or in later adult life, work not only like Chaucerian tales to reveal their teller, but have an affectionately satirical take on the nature of Guyanese fiction making.By ranging across Guyanese ethnicities, gender and time in the purported authorship of these stories, McWatt creates a richly dialogic work of fiction. And when McWatt apparently slips some of his own biography into a brilliantly comic story of betrayal (that ends in the victim's suicide), but told by another member of the group, the implications of the collection's subtitle, 'Fictions of atonement' become teasingly ambiguous.