UWI graduates are everywhere – politics, business, the arts, and as public intellectuals. In the coming months, UWI TODAY will profile some of our high achieving alumni who have made or are making a positive impact on society.
Celeste Mohammed is hard to pin down, and that’s how she likes it.
For lovers of Caribbean literature, especially its current wave, she is highly-regarded as a novelist and short story writer. But before that, she was a corporate lawyer, one at the tippy top of her profession at a state company. Her writing delves into some of the grittiest caverns of the Trinbagonian experience, yet the author herself is a middle class woman. She forcefully says that she is not a feminist, but follows with “I have feminist concerns”.
And although these unusual variations are just who she is, Mohammed’s unwillingness to fit into a single category is also a manifesto for her work and life.
“Labels make me itch,” she says. “They make me deeply uncomfortable. Life is a lot more flexible than many people allow it to be. I can be one thing and another, I can do one thing and another. A lot of what people call breaking expectations is just that. It’s me having a wider view of what’s possible.”
That ability to take a wider view is well-reflected in her writing, and the response of readers. In her relatively short career as a writer, she was first published in 2017, she has won the John D Gardner Memorial Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Robert J Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, the Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction, and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. In March of this year, she won the Hope Prize, competing against more than 2,500 entrants from about 90 countries.
“My phone rang late in the night,” Mohammed describes the moment her victory was announced. “The woman on the other end had an Australian accent and she said ‘we’re calling to let you know you’ve won’. I had to sit down. I think I started to cry. The next morning, when I woke, I didn’t even know if it was real.”
She sighs, “It’s an honour. It was more than I had hoped for. I am very grateful.”
Although she made her transition from lawyer, having studied Law at The UWI, to writer, Mohammed always had the soul of an author.
“I was always a writerly child,” she recalls. “I would always be the weird child who needed to go off by herself. I always had that thoughtful, observing, trying-to-figure-things-out essence.”
Growing up in San Fernando, “just off Cipero Street” as she describes it, finding time to herself was an active pursuit. Though her immediate family was small, her mother, brother and herself, she was part of what she called a traditional Indo-Caribbean family: her grandmother and aunts, 15 people in two houses and a big yard.
She says, “Growing up in a big family, you are never alone. You always feel like you have support. People have your back.”
And though she is the only writer in the family, they were all storytellers in the Trini tradition. They all had “a sense of humor, a sense of playfulness”.
“Those are the things that characterise my family and form the foundation of my storytelling,” Mohammed says.
Growing up on Enid Blyton’s The Secret Seven, The Famous Five, from a young age, she was a reader. At age seven, she wrote her own Blyton-style mystery, a group of young detectives with a special twist: they all liked Johnny Depp.Unfortunately, the very practical considerations of family and career expectations required the writerly child to choose a “good” career.
“Lawyer, doctor, engineer,” she lists her choices.
She chose Law. In those days, The UWI’s Faculty of Law was on the Cave Hill Campus in Barbados. Students from Trinidad and Tobago did their first year at St Augustine, the second and third at Cave Hill and then returned to T&T to complete their legal education at the Hugh Wooding Law School.
“The first year here was fun,” she recalls. “I wasn’t too far from home. I had friends on campus.”
Cave Hill was much more challenging because of the distance and the different culture, especially as a young person who came from a close-knit family.
Nevertheless, she says the university “took me from being a little girl from South into being a woman with an understanding of the Caribbean”.
That’s clear in how she talks about writing and literature in general. She speaks profusely about the “geographic Caribbean”, both with pride in its literary output and the desire to contribute to its development. Contribution, to her, includes the example she sets as a writer from the region who has made it spectacularly in a short space of time, but also as a teacher.
By 2011, Mohammed had a very successful career.
“I was probably the third most important person in the company,” she says. “I was well-liked by the board.”
Yet she had the feeling many artists with unrequited creativity had, a desire to express herself in her art form.
She recalls: “I remember praying about the discontent I felt at my job, and I distinctly remember being at the kitchen sink washing dishes one day, wrestling with this whole thing. And I heard a voice in my head say, ‘I am not asking you to do anything. I am asking you to stop doing something’.”
So, she took a sabbatical. This was the first of many steps, some painful, that would eventually lead her to do an MFA in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Massachusetts. Then came the quickening. She attended in 2014, graduated in 2016, and by 2017 her first story was accepted for publication by the well-regarded journal, New England Review. The collection of stories she completed while doing the MFA would eventually be compiled as Pleasantview, her first published book. It would win several awards, including the OCM Bocas Prize.
Mohammed published a non-fiction book in 2023 based on interviews with Caribbean women in the energy sector titled A Different Energy: Women in Caribbean Oil & Gas. In 2025, she published what she describes as “a more personal work” drawn from “family stories and experiences”, Ever Since We Small.
So far, for 2026, her story “Plenty Time” has won the Hope Prize and was also short-listed for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. It’s an astounding record of success that she attributes to her work ethic.
“I don’t know how to do anything halfway,” she says. “Everything I do, I put myself into it 150 percent.”
Then, she adds, “Sometimes it’s a good thing, and sometimes it’s a bad thing,” embracing binaries, even in examining her success.
Currently, Mohammed is working on her fourth book, another novel. She is also working on a non-fiction ghost writing project. Perhaps most delightfully of all, the writerly-child-now-woman, is teaching a creative writing course to ten students from across the Caribbean.
“There is a lot of talent in the Caribbean, but there is not a lot of high quality training,” she says. “I came up with the programme, pitched it to Bocas [Lit Fest], and negotiated with my publishers in the UK, Jacaranda Books, who are funding it. We meet twice a week. It is quite rigorous. I call it a short story intensive.”
The storyteller who found her way back has put together her own Blyton-esque gang of adventurers: The Intensive Ten.
