Four Caribbean achievers are expected to be honoured on Saturday at the Anthony N Sabga Caribbean Awards for Excellence.

Professor David Dabydeen and James Husbands have won awards in Arts and Letters and Science and Technology respectively. Annette Arjoon and Claudette Richardson-Pious will share an award for Public and Civic contributions.

Each award consists of a gold medal, a citation and TT$500,000. The awards are given by the ANSA McAL Foundation.

There is no application for the Anthony N Sabga Awards. Each winner was nominated by a country nominating committee and selected by a regional eminent persons

selection panel chaired by Sir Ellis Clarke.

About the laureates Professor Dabydeen, a prize-winning Guyanese writer and academic, is course, convenor for the Master of Arts degree in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature in English at Warwick University in the UK. He has published over 20 books, and won the Commonwealth Prize for his first book, Slave Song.

“At the age of ten I knew I wanted to be a writer and nothing else,” he said in an interview after the announcement of the 2008 Anthony Sabga Awards in January.

“I hope that the prize will encourage publishers to take Caribbean literature more seriously.”

Husbands heads the major solar water heater firm in the Caribbean, Solar Dynamics. A Barbadian entrepreneur, he has spent over 30 years in the industry and his company has installed over 33,000 solar water heaters. These help in the conservation of the environment as the sun is a “clean” source of energy.

Arjoon is the secretary of the Guyana Marine Turtle Conservation Society (GMTCS). She was co-founder of the group, which conserves the four species of marine turtle in the main nesting area, Shell Beach, on Guyana’s coast close to the Venezuelan border. She was instrumental in the

founding of North West Organics, a venture that capitalises on traditional Amerindian products made in the Shell Beach area.

Of the award, she said, “It’s going to make such a difference in the work of small NGOs. The money is good but the awareness is even better.”

Richardson-Pious is a well-known dramatist from Jamaica who co-founded the NGO Children First in Spanish Town, Jamaica. Children First started by serving 50 street children in 1997. Today it serves over 3,000 children directly and affects tens of thousands more from the whole of

Jamaica. Its work includes education, vocational training, poverty alleviation, parent support and training, and counselling.