Sweetheart (Trésor in French) has been awarded the
2017 Prix Carbet des Lycéens. It’s a literary
competition, judged by French-Caribbean high school students, to highlight the
best writing by authors from the entire Caribbean region.
“I was
moved and honored that the book was chosen by students, although I’d previously
considered it a work for the over-16s,” says Alecia. “It touches on heavy themes including death
and incest which require a certain maturity.
It’s about a Jamaican artist who dies in unclear circumstances, and the
reader learns about her life from people who knew her, and who talk about her.”
Through
the different narratives, readers learn, among other things, about the life of
the artist’s Jewish grandfather. Jamaican-Jewish? “Yes, there’s a sizable community of people
whose ancestors were Jewish in Jamaica. My primary school was near one of the
oldest synagogues in the region.”
On the importance of the setting, Alecia says: “This is an essential element
of storytelling. If I didn’t tell the
truth about the setting, I would feel I were betraying readers, my country. How can you write about a place if you don’t
know the setting? It has to be
authentic. I try to put that across when teaching my students short-story
writing at WICE”