Background
Robert Antoni was born in the United States of Trinidadian parents and grew up largely in the Bahamas, where his father practised medicine.
Robert Antoni was born in the United States of Trinidadian parents and grew up largely in the Bahamas, where his father practised medicine.
Antoni studied at Duke University and in the creative writing programme at Johns Hopkins University, before joining the Iowa Writers" Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he began working on Divina Trace.
He is a Guggenheim Fellow for 2010 for his work on the historical novel He says his "fictional world" is "Corpus Christi", the invented island (based on Trinidad) that he introduced in his first novel, Divina Trace (1991). Antoni lived for a time in Barcelona and taught at the University of Miami from 1992 to 2001. In 2004, he began teaching at Barnard College, Columbia University and The New School.
In 2010, he was a Guggenheim Fellow.
Antoni currently resides in New York City. 1992 Commonwealth Writers" Prize: Best First Book, "Divina Trace".
1992 Commonwealth Writers" Prize: Best First Book, "Divina Trace" 1999 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, My Grandmother"s Tale of How Crab-o Lost His Head 2010 Guggenheim Fellow for his work on the historical novel As Flies to Whatless Boys 2014 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (Fiction and overall winner), As Flies to Whatless Boys.
