Dear Editor,
I WISH to respond to Mr. Al Creighton’s Letter captioned: ”Al Creighton responds to Guyana Prize Critics” published in the Guyana Chronicle on July 5th, 2018 and the other newspapers simultaneously. In my letter published in the Guyana Chronicle and Kaieteur News pertaining to the Guyana Prize I dealt with some issues, the first I quote below from my letter dated May 18, 2018.

”The deadline for submission to the Guyana Prize was March 31, 2017, with the awards ceremony slated to be held in July, 2017.We are now into May 2018, about 10 months past the awards ceremony due date and writers are still waiting to be informed by Mr. Al Creighton, secretary and administrator of the prize shortlist and awards ceremony date in blind hopes.”

May I now say we are in July 2018, one year now and Mr Al Creighton has failed to address why this incompetent Prize for Literature is now a year after submission deadline and ”No Award Ceremony ” is held and he has the temerity to compare this flawed prize to the standard of international prizes.

I also addressed the issues where I gave a thesis on judges becoming entrants and entrants becoming judges. Mr Creighton makes a defence in his reply to me as follows: ”Rev. Cecil misquotes the rules from the international IMPAC Dublin Prize for Fiction to support his claim. It is basic commonsense, in fact, it is a sine qua non in any literary prize that no one can be a judge and a contestant at the same time; no one can be a member of the prize committee and enter his work in the same competition. That is standard practice: those rules do apply in the Guyana Prize and have never been violated.” Al Creighton Guyana Chronicle July 5th, 2018.

I did not misquote the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and its rules state: “A book shall not be eligible for entry for the award if the author or translator thereof is any of the following: (1) A member of the Board of Management; (2) A member of the staff of the Dublin City Council; (3) An officer or employee of IMPAC Ltd; (4) A member of the judging panel; (5) A parent, spouse or child of any of the foregoing.” (The rules and regulations should be integrated into The Guyana Prize for Literature brochure.)
Mr. Creighton is saying to the Guyana literati and writers who submitted entries that it is okay to be an entrant one year and a judge the next year, winning the award all the time in a monotonous revolution.

”Here are persons who have been winners of the Guyana Prize and who have also served as judges at different times – never at the same time. This is standard practice in the large international literary prizes, and we have made this correction before in the press.”
My concern was, it is the same judges who were entrants who were winning the prize all the time up to four or five times. No award in the world will ever allow such an unscrupulous act but ”The Guyana Prize for Literature” Mr. Creighton accepts that the Guyana Prize brochure has no such regulations to bar former judges to enter for the award. I believe such regulations should be integrated into the award brochure.

In some major literary awards abroad a winner who is a well-established literary scholar can be called to be a judge for the award, but not an entrant again and again as judge then entrant, winning it all the time. Once an entrant wins a major literary award and moved on to be a judge he/she will be barred to enter for that award again abroad. It seems to me that Mr. Creighton is trying to deceive the Guyanese public by using exquisite Latin phrases like ‘ultra vires’. Some entrants who have won a prize at an international award will sometimes be asked to submit another entry only after five years have elapsed. Why these greedy literary bureaucrats cannot live and let others live by giving them a chance, since they are already very rich?

A former judge of any literary award knows the literary criteria by which an award is judged. Doesn’t the fact remain that they were fully aware of the literary criteria by which the contest was being judged and this helped them to write books to suit the judges’ criteria and thus emerge as winners?

Doesn’t the fact remain that they are known to the other judges not give them an advantage over other entrants? Only a few Guyanese writers living and working in Guyana have won the prize. The awards are going to Guyanese who have been living over 30-40 years overseas.

Has the Guyana Prize for Literature helped emerging writers living and writing in Guyana? The answer is no. Writers living and writing in Guyana don’t have a publishing house here to help them get their works published. That is the reason the overseas-based Guyanese writers are winning the prize all the time; because their books are properly edited and published by international publishers, and they have already won several international literary awards abroad. So how can our local writers compete with these fully established and recognised writers? Writers who won the Guyana Prize here are not even 0.3 per cent; that is very sad.

One of my major concerns is the quality of writing that has won the Guyana Prize. I have read all these books with a great deal of interest. Some of them like Essequibo; Martin Carter’s Selected Poems are great poetry that deserved the prize. Then I read some really vulgar and immoral works that are loaded with ‘cuss words,’ sexual overtures and hardcore material that’s mind-boggling to the real academic. My question is this: how can we teach such books as literature to our young students in schools and university?

What literary criteria were used to give these immoral books a prize? One of Mr. Creighton’s four-time Guyana Prize winner Harold Bascom wrote the following: ”Dear Minister Norton, there is a way for you to go down as the most effective Minister of Culture Guyana has ever had; and it will redeem you from being regarded as having been a mere political appointee with the least interest in culture—a square peg in a round hole.” July 1, 2018 Kaieteur News.

That is a very disgusting and derogatory statement to the Hon Minister of Culture, Dr. George Norton, so the minister and our current administration must do the honourable thing and scrap the Guyana Prize for Literature until further notice and demote the prize secretary and the incompetent Guyana Prize board with immediate effect.

Regards,
Rev. Gideon Cecil