PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad – The Anthony N. Sabga Caribbean Awards for Excellence (ANSCAFE) has announced four laureates for its 2018 Awards.

They are:

• Arts & Letters: Professor Kei Miller, Jamaica
• Entrepreneurship:. William Andrew Boyle, Guyana
• Public & Civic Contributions: Chevaughn and Noel Joseph, Trinidad and Tobago
• Science & Technology: Adesh Ramsubhag, Trinidad & Tobago
• Kei Miller, professor of English and creative writing at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, has produced three novels, a short story collection, four poetry collections and a book of “essays and prophecies”.

Miller  won the Forward Prize for Poetry (2014),  the premier accolade in the United Kingdom  and Ireland for established and emerging poets. He is the first writer from the Caribbean to win the prize. His first collection of short fiction, The Fear of Stones, was short-listed in 2007 for the Commonwealth Writers First Book Prize. His novel, Augustown, won the Bocas Literary prize in 2017 and its French translation won the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde.

Microbiologist William Andrew Boyle is a medical services entrepreneur. He is the founder of the Eureka Medical Laboratory (EML) in Guyana which provides state-of-the-art services to the country and region. He has also diversified the laboratory, and his general business enterprise in other directions such as green energy and food production.

EML is the premier internationally accredited lab in Guyana, one of only five such in the Caribbean. It is also the first and so far the only lab in the country to offer the SchuyNet Lab Information System (LIS) services, whereby test results can be accessed by doctors online and in real time.

Chevaughn and Noel Joseph are President and Vice-President, respectively of the Just Because Foundation  (JBF)  a non-profit paediatric cancer support organization  in Trinidad that “provides emotional, practical, and social support for families of children with cancer.”

JBF’s work has been recognized by several awards, including the Trinidad Express Individual(s) of the Year award in 2008. In 2013, Chevaughn and Noel Joseph were awarded the Ministry of Sport’s Spirit of Sport Award (SOSA) in the category Sport for a Social Cause. And in 2015, the Eric Williams Memorial Committee’s Father of the Nation Medal of Honor (Gold) for Child Care and Community Service was conferred on the JBF.

Dr Adesh Ramsubhag is a senior lecturer in microbiology and plant pathology and Head of the Life Sciences Department at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine.  Since joining that department in December 2001, he has produced research which has affected the commercial meat industry, agriculture, forestry, fisheries, animal husbandry, environmental pollution (including oil spill clean ups) and the potential production of novel medical antibiotics. He has also contributed to establishing microbiology as a discipline in its own right at the Faculty of Science and Technology, UWI, St Augustine.

The Laureates were proposed by country nominating committees and selected by a regional panel of eminent persons (EPP).

The prizes are worth (TT) $500,000 each and each laureate receives a medal and citation at the awards ceremony, which will be held on May 5, 2018, at a venue to be announced.

ANSCAFE has been in existence since 2005.