Demerara
Writers’ Lab

Jasmaine Payne is a Guyanese writer, editor and communications specialist. Her debut novel, LEECH, won the 2025 Guyana Prize for Literature for Best First Book of Fiction and earned international recognition, including Second Place at the 2026 BookFest Awards and finalist placements at the Page Turner Awards and Literary Global Book Awards. She is Lead Editor of the Guyana Chronicle Pepperpot Magazine and has edited for UNICEF and the United Nations in Guyana. Through workshops, publishing consultancy and mentorship, she creates opportunities for Guyanese writers to develop their craft and bring their work to market. She holds a BA in English from the University of London and an MBA in Marketing. Her second novel is forthcoming.

Stephen Narain is the author of the novel The Church of Mastery (Restless Books, 2027). He is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English and Creative Writing with a concentration in Caribbean Studies at the University of Miami where he works under the supervision of Patricia Saunders and Kelly Baker Josephs.

Raised in Freeport, Bahamas by Guyanese educators, Narain moved to Miami at seventeen. He holds an A.B. in English with High Honors from Harvard College and an M.F.A. in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where he was a Paul and Daisy Soros New American Fellow.

His writing has appeared in Small Axe, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Wasafiri, Moko, and Landscapes of Consciousness. In 2025, he received the Steven G. Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature, and his essay “Superpositional Minds: Multilocal Consciousness, AI, and the Posthuman Turn” was shortlisted for the Berggruen Institute’s Essay Competition.

His current academic research examines C.L.R. James’s engagement with the work of Herman Melville. A Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project, Narain writes on free speech, higher education, and issues facing Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora communities. Prior to beginning his Ph.D., Stephen spent over a decade teaching writing and literature at the University of Iowa, Valencia College, and The Door: A Center of Alternatives, a youth advocacy center in Lower Manhattan. He currently serves as a Research Fellow at Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal.

Oliver Geffen is a translator, a writer and a DPhil student in Theology at the University of Oxford. His doctoral research investigates the cultural and theological implications of the Binding of Isaac in both ancient texts and in contemporary Hebrew literature. His work interrogates the limits of literary protest, examining whether contemporary Hebrew texts that invoke the Binding to resist divinely mandated fates inadvertently commit themselves to the Binding’s redemptive framework. His work draws on early 20th-century theorists and thinkers—including Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas—as well as contemporary developments in reading practices and hermeneutics.

Oliver was recently awarded the Taube Award from the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (OCHJS) for his research on Walter Benjamin’s concept of Scripture. This work is forthcoming as a chapter in a De Gruyter volume marking the centennial of Benjamin’s essay, The Task of the Translator. He has presented this work in conferences at Oxford and Cambridge, and has co-hosted an afterhours event on this topic at the National Gallery in London.

Oliver’s translation of a selection of vignettes by Esther Orner was recently published by Asymptote. Orner is a Holocaust survivor and Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, and this is the first time her work is translated into English. His work with Nicholas de Lange on the translation of S. Yizhar’s Days of Ziklag is ongoing, with a full manuscript expected by the end of 2026.

Oliver is based in Georgetown, Guyana.