Celeste Mohammed

Celeste Mohammed is a novelist and former lawyer from Trinidad and Tobago. Her first novel, Pleasantview, won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in 2022. Mohammed's literature centres the heritage and experiences of contemporary Caribbean people and heritage, often writing in Trinidadian Creole.

Biography Mohammed was born and raised in San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago, in an Indo-Trinidadian family. She studied law at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Barbados, and at Hugh Wooding Law School, and after being called to the Bar in 2001 she practised law for ten years, in Trinidad, Barbados and Belize. She decided to follow her initial call to be a writer after a year-long sabbatical in 2011, during which she turned to writing as a way to grieve the loss of family and friends. graduating in 2016. The stories written for her thesis were the foundation for her first published book, Pleasantview. Her external thesis examiner encouraged Mohammed to submit her work to publishers and, in 2017, she received an acceptance from the New England Review. Mohammed stated that she was surprised, "especially as the story is written in (Trinidadian English) Creole, not Standard English".

Mohammed second novel-in-stories, Ever Since We Small, was published in October 2025. Inspired by memories from her grandmother and her great-aunt, this book unpacks the female experience across generations in an Indo-Trinidadian family.

Awards 2017: John D Gardner Memorial Prize for Fiction. 2019: Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction. 2022: OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

Books

Pleasantview (2021) A Different Energy: Women in Caribbean Oil & Gas (2023) Ever Since We Small (2025)