The Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut (IAI, Ibero-American Institute) is a multi-disciplinary, non-university institution of the humanities, cultural sciences, and social sciences. Its regional focus is Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain, and Portugal, while it also incorporates transregional interrelationships. The library of the IAI is the largest European library focusing on these regions. It offers its services in the Reading Room in Berlin, but also independent of location, e.g. large databases, e-books, e-journals, digital objects and the international interlibrary loan. The Specialized Information Service offers tools and data for researchers.

A short presentation introducing to IAI and FID’s research possibilities can be found here.

WISC

The West Indiana and Special Collections Division of the Alma Jordan Library at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, is a repository of international significance for research on the English-speaking West Indies, from Guyana in the south to Bermuda in the north and including Belize in Central America. The Division comprises two sections: a general section and the Special Collections. The latter contains manuscripts, personal papers, archival material and rare books. Researchers can access the Special Collections database at: https://archivespace.sta.uwi.edu/ The Division serves students, faculty, and staff of the university as well as external researchers, both local and foreign.

Research queries can be sent to: wimail(at)sta.uwi.edu.

Founded in 2011, the NGC Bocas Lit Fest is Trinidad and Tobago’s premier annual literary festival: a lively celebration of books, writers, writing, and ideas, with a Caribbean focus and international scope. The festival brings together readers and writers from Trinidad and Tobago, the Caribbean, and the wider world for readings, performances, workshops, discussions, film screenings, and more. Most events are free and open to the public. In 2023, our first in-person festival in four years will run from 28 to 30 April.

Écritures des Amériques

Since its creation in 2000 by writer Maryse Condé and industrialist Amédée Huyghues Despointes, the festival Écritures des Amériques has been inviting audiences to astonishing encounters where the power and diversity of the imaginary worlds of the Caribbean, the Americas, Africa and all the real or fictional territories where writing invites itself are heard and responded to. From island to archipelago, from Guadeloupe to Désirade, Marie-Galante, Saint-Barthélemy, Les Saintes and Saint-Martin, a caravel of authors unfurls across our island territory, inviting us, through the magnetic mirror of a situation, a fragment of autobiography or a character, to reconsider our use of the world, to enliven and extend the trace of our thoughts, to hear the rustle of all the books that inhabit us. Over the years, some sixty authors, including Maryse Condé, Dany Laferrière, Jean-Marie Le Clézio and Alain Mabanckou, have embraced the festival’s spirit of exchange and encounter, and have generously come to write a new page in this long literary adventure.

In 2023, in Maryse Condé’s mother town Pointe-à-Pitre, the association “Kaz a Condé” was created in a building made available by municipal authorities. The organization provides first and foremost a documentary space, containing the writer’s works and the books produced on her, her thoughts and her writings. At the same time, it is an event hall that has already hosted several exhibitions and literary events. The “Kaz a Condé” activities are set to extend beyond Guadeloupe, with the participation of literary critics from other Caribbean countries, the USA, Europe, and Africa.