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About the Author
Otancia Noel is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago. She grew up between the south and the Jamaat Al Muslimeen compound. She has a degree in Mass Communication and an MFA in Creative Writing Prose Fiction. Her stories, articles, and scholarly articles have been published in various journals. She was longlisted for the Johnson and Amoy Caribbean Prize both in fiction (2019) and non-fiction (2020). She is also winner of the Hachette and Hodder Education UK Island Voices Caribbean Contemporary Prize 2022. Town on Fire is her debut short fiction collection
Town on Fire:
Untold Stories from a Caribbean Coup
Otancia Noel’s Town on Fire is a powerful collection of short stories inspired by the 1990 Trinidad coup, exploring life, identity, and resilience through characters shaped by her own experiences growing up on the Jamaat compound. The main thread in most of the stories is The Compound, The Khalif and Abi, and an exploration of life before the coup and after. The themes in the stories highlight culture, family ties, man’s need for power, greed, abuse, rape, flawed leadership in the name of God, religious fanaticism, the psychological bond between leaders and their followers, the issue of internal migration in families moving to The Compound, external migration with the exodus of nationals to Syria all these elements are linked to The Compound.
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