Today will close an important chapter in the celebration and award of the 2024 Guyana Prize for Literature, whose winners received their awards on Friday at the Atlantic Conference Centre in the Pegasus Hotel. It is the final day of this year’s Literary Festival. The curtains also closed on the 2025 National Poetry Slam with a winner declared at the end of the hotly contested finals at Castellani House last night.
Guyana’s primary literary and artistic event for the year takes its curtain call tonight with the staging of the play “Don’t Ask Me Why” by Rae Wiltshire, the winner of the Guyana Prize for Drama 2023. This is a play that will raise eyebrows and provoke reactions as it asks questions about the creation of the human world. It puts an existentialist, Freudian, post-modernist twist to the creation myth.
This colourful drama at the National Cultural Centre exhibits the stage work of Wiltshire, founding member, but now a former member, and Ayanna Waddell, a present executive member of the National Drama Company. There is a great deal of artistic design and some spectacle in its presentation. This play is the eighth to be produced in the Minister of Culture Charles Ramson’s “Write to Stage Theatre Support Programme” and the ministry sponsored its production. This allows a public audience to see the plays that have won awards in the Guyana Prize.
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