Latest update April 7th, 2025 6:08 AM
Playwright Harold Bascom on Guyana Prize shortlist
Novelist, playwright and artist Harold Bascom is aiming to win the coveted local award for a third time.
Bascom is among those shortlisted for the 2010 Guyana Prize for Literature (Drama category). The winners are to be announced during the awards ceremony on September 1.
Moongazing zombie
Bascom, who now lives overseas, is a two-time winner with the plays ‘Two Wrongs’ and ‘Makantali’, the latter of which was performed recently at the Theatre Guild.
His new Guyana Prize entry, ‘Blank Document’, focuses on the travails of Simone Fraser, an award winning writer whose career is derailed after her same-sex relationship is exposed.
Simone flees to the United States to start a new life and the play focuses on the challenges she faces in a new society and on her redemption.
Bascom says that he completed the first draft of his play in five days.
Known for his ‘mirror plays’, Bascom, a prolific writer, had a large and loyal following in the eighties and nineties with productions such as ‘The Barrel, ‘TV Alley’, and Tessa Real Girl and the Old Fool’.
He is also the author of Apata’, a novel loosely based on the nineteen fifties manhunt for bandit Clement Cuffy.
A recent painting entitled ‘Brownstone dreams’
Living in the US for the past 15 years, Bascom has remained active. He has written another play about a Latin American Dictator, another novel (Shuttered Street) and recently published a short story in a US magazine, and recently completed a series of paintings (labeled ‘Brownstones’), which he plans to exhibit soon.
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