‘It’s a huge honour’

On Saturday, May 24, the second day of the 2025 Calabash Literary Festival at Calabash Bay, Treasure Beach in St Elizabeth, between 2:30 and 4 p.m., Jamaica-born poet, author, scholar and educator, Professor Jason Allen-Paisant, will be reading a chapter from his latest book, ‘ The Possibility of Tenderness’, he being this year’s featured writer, in a segment called, ‘All Memory is Fiction’.

The Leeds-England resident holds an on-scholarship University of Oxford Doctor of Philosophy degree in medieval and modern languages, and is a full professor of critical theory and creative writing at the University of Manchester, England. He was also associate professor of aesthetic theory and decolonial thought at the University of Leeds, and is an associate editor of Callaloo Literary Journal and a member of the board of the Callaloo Foundation.

The Coffee Grove, Manchester-Jamaica native’s impressive curriculum vitae and the fact that he is currently one of the most-sought-after writers in Europe are perhaps the reasons he was selected.

“It’s a huge honour and a moment of redemption for me. It’s probably gonna fully hit me when I am on the stage. This is a kind of recognition that I have gained a certain standard that warranted my being a featured writer at Calabash,” he told The Gleaner.

“Let’s keep it real. You have to be slaying, at the top of your game, to get invited to Calabash, so to be invited really was just great … I feel like I have come a long way, it’s a huge privilege to be there, alongside some of the writers I’ve admired. It’s just great.”

Forever the poet, Professor Allen-Paisant’s début poetry collection is ‘ Thinking with Trees’, after which ‘ Self-portrait as Othello’ (2023) came along. His other books include two academic monographs, ‘ Théâtre Dialectique Postcolonial’, a study of Caribbean theatre; ‘ Engagements with Aimé Césaire’, a philosophical treatise about the Martinican poet and thinker; and ‘ The Natural World’, a collaboration with photographers David Hartt and John Edmonds, and curator Nathaniel Stein.

Thinking with Trees won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize, and was an Irish Times and White Review book of the year. In 2023, Self-Portrait as Othello won the Forward Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize, the UK’s most prestigious poetry awards. It is one of rare books to have accomplished this feat.

ARTIST’S MEMOIR

Professor Allen-Paisant has held fellowships from the British Academy, and Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and the Imagination, and was a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Leeds, among others. He has also guest-edited multiple scholarly journal issues and his work is widely anthologised. His recent art collaborators include British painter Chris Ofili, the Manchester Art Gallery and the Cincinnati Art Gallery.

Despite all of these recognitions, Professor Allen-Paisant told The Gleaner that something was missing from his long list of achievements up to the point of being invited to read at Calabash.

“For a long time, I was on the other side looking at the writers … huge respect and admiration for the people on that stage … As a Jamaican writer, you could be successful abroad until you wish, but until you have graced the Calabash stage, something is missing.”

Over the years, he would look at the festival programmes and invited writers, and dreamed that one day he too would be on the Calabash stage, but he shared that dreaming of something and seeing it come to reality are two different things. There were challenges along the way.

“One thing my grandmother taught me was you have to dream … I wouldn’t have travelled the roads I’ve travelled, taken the journeys I’ve taken if I weren’t a dreamer … When you dream you expand your mind’s possibilities … You have to thing big … Dreaming is a part of how you create your reality,” Professor Allen-Paisant told The Gleaner.

He regards his appearance at Calabash a “major, major” stop on his journeys, a great validation, and a homecoming of sort, as his mother, sister, wife and two daughters, and Jamaican friends will be in the audience. And talking about homecoming, his latest book, The Possibility of Tenderness, is a work of literary nonfiction through which he has taken readers back to his childhood home.

“It is a love letter to Jamaica on a whole, but more specifically, a love letter to this small district of mine called Coffee Grove in Manchester. It’s about my maternal grandmother, who was a plant woman, who was a church woman. She knew about plants and communicated with them. That’s a character many Jamaicans can identify with,” Professor Allen-Paisant said.

“But, it is also an artist’s memoir of his journey, leaving that district, going overseas in search of opportunities, and in coming back, realising that all of what that [place] represents is a story of my creativity and artistry that is linked to the earth. This is a story that a lot of Jamaicans can relate to.” The Possibility of Tenderness is available at Kingston Book Shop.