Ever Since We Small Lincoln Book Launch

“I simply fell in love with Jayanti who to my mind is a true feminist and who totally sets the tone for this allegorical, whilst at the same time realistic work on the lives of many indentured labourers.”

Yvonne Bailey-Smith, author of The Day I fell off my island

A Lincoln Library afternoon with Celeste Mohammed and her second novel-in-stories Ever Since We Small in collaboration with Lincoln Central Library.

The award-winning author will be in conversation with Professor Claudia Capancioni to discuss craft, narrative and historic documentation in fiction as an Indo-Trinidadian writer.

As a key figure in the Research & Knowledge Exchange Unit, ‘Voicing the Past: ‘Culture, Legacy, and Narrative’, Professor Capancioni is the perfect voice to lead the audience in a relaxed and conversational interrogation of Mohammed’s Ever Since We Small.

Books will be sold with a book signing to follow the conversation and a chance to meet the Trinidad-based award-winning author in person.

Date: Friday 17th October 2025

Time: 2:00pm

Location: Lincoln Central Library

Keep up with the rest of her tour here to see if she is coming to a city near you or a city of a friend who needs to be in the know!

Ever Since We Small Blurb

An intricately woven tapestry of stories where survival, resilience and self-discovery are passed down through generations of an Indo-Trinidadian family.

Celeste Mohammed's second novel-in-stories, Ever Since We Small, is a family saga which covers a sweeping landscape from the days of the British Raj in India, to multicultural modern Trinidad. Written in a blend of Standard English and several flavours of Trinidad kriol, the book follows the bloodline of a young woman, Jayanti, after her decision to become a girmitiya, an indentured labourer in the Caribbean.

Jayanti's grandson, Lall Gopaul, seeks to escape the rural village where he was born, but becomes seduced and corrupted by urban life. His son, Shiva, is forced to take a child-bride, Salma, but never recovers from the guilt. Heartache follows for their three children - Anand, Nadya and Abby - who must each find a way to accept and yet move past their parents' failed example.

Along the journey of these ten interconnected stories, the alchemy necessary to turn the Gopauls' inheritance of pain into a "generation of gold" requires intervention by the living and dead, the "real" and the mythical, the mundane and the magical, the secular and the sacred.

About Celeste Mohammed

​​Celeste has been a lawyer since 2001 but she has been telling stories all her life. A native of Trinidad and Tobago, in 2016, she graduated from Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, with an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction). Celeste's goal is to dispel all myths about island-life and island-people, and to showcase the musicality and resonance of Trinidadian creole (kriol).

Her work has appeared in The New England Review, Litmag, Epiphany, The Rumpus, among other places. She is the recipient of a 2018 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She was also awarded the 2019 Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction, and the 2017 John D Gardner Memorial Prize for Fiction.

About Professor Claudia Capancioni

Claudia is a Professor of English Literature and Programme Leader for English, including the MA English Literature and MA Children’s Literature and Literacies. She is a Senior Fellow of Higher Education Academy (SFHEA). At BGU, she leads the Research & Knowledge Exchange Unit, ‘Voicing the Past: ‘Culture, Legacy, and Narrative’. She is also the academic lead for the Sandford Award, and a member of the Research Ethics and Quality Assurance Committees.

She is the Membership Secretary of the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS).

The contribution of women to literatures in English is her scholarly pursuit, with a focus on the long nineteenth century, the twentieth and twenty-first century. She specialises in Victorian and contemporary women writers, life and travel writing, adaptation, gender and translation studies. She has a keen interest in multigenerational literary legacy, intellectual circles, intertextuality, and transnational studies.

She has also published on detective fiction, the Gothic, Anglo-Italian literary and cultural connections, and Joyce Salvadori Lussu. Her publications include translations into English of Italian literary texts. She teaches nineteenth-century and contemporary literature, literary theory, and research skills at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She previously taught Victorian literature and Modernism at the University of Hull, where she was awarded her Ph.D.