Dr Paul Keens-Douglas

Storyteller · Poet · Playwright · Cultural Icon · T&T Poet Laureate (2017–2019) · Carifesta Award 2025

Trinidad & Tobago

Known to generations of Caribbean audiences as 'Mr Tim Tim' — is one of the most enduring and beloved cultural figures in the English-speaking Caribbean.

Biography

The Story

Dr Paul Keens-Douglas — known to generations of Caribbean audiences as 'Mr Tim Tim' — is one of the most enduring and beloved cultural figures in the English-speaking Caribbean. Born in Trinidad on 22 September 1942 and raised in Grenada, he has spent more than fifty years building a body of work — as storyteller, poet, playwright, performer, broadcaster, author, and entrepreneur — that has made the vernacular, humour, and social texture of Caribbean life a matter of serious artistic pride. In October 2025, he performed Ent Dat Nice at the Central Bank Auditorium in Port of Spain — a 50th anniversary special edition of his signature Tim Tim show, celebrating half a century of continuous live performance. At the same year's Carifesta XV in Barbados, he received the Carifesta Award for his lifetime contribution to regional arts, joining the most distinguished cohort of Caribbean cultural honourees.

Origins, Education, and a Caribbean Childhood

Paul Keens-Douglas was born in Trinidad to Grenadian parents and spent the majority of his childhood and adolescent years in Grenada — an island whose oral and folk traditions would shape his artistic identity for life. He attended Wesley Hall Methodist School and the prestigious Presentation Boys College in Grenada, where he formed early connections with figures who would go on to historic prominence, including Maurice Bishop, who later became the political leader of the New JEWEL Movement and People's Revolutionary Government of Grenada from 1979 to 1983.

His academic formation took him far beyond the Caribbean. He holds diplomas in Commercial Broadcasting and Radio/TV Production from Announcer Training Studios and the RCA Institutes of New York — a training that grounded him in the technical and editorial craft of broadcast media before the term 'content creator' existed. He earned a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Sociology from Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) in Montreal, Canada — an institution of historic significance, site of the famous 1969 Sir George Williams Riot — and subsequently completed two years of post-graduate work at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, where he also served as Sub-Warden at Irvine Hall.

During his time in Montreal, he attended Expo 67 as a representative of the Trinidad and Tobago pavilion — an early international role that gave him exposure to the kind of cultural diplomacy he would practise throughout his life. He returned to Trinidad in 1974, and has been there ever since.

The Tim Tim Show

The first Tim Tim Show took place in 1975 at the Little Carib Theatre in Port of Spain — a modest beginning that Keens-Douglas himself describes as simply an opportunity to read poems and stories from his first book to an audience. 'We taped it and I made an album with the tape,' he has recalled. 'The first show started in 1975 and that really started me off on my career.' What began as a reading became a theatrical institution.

Over the following five decades, the Tim Tim Show became one of the most consistent and beloved fixtures of Trinidad's cultural calendar — a family-friendly, socially sharp, and linguistically rich celebration of Caribbean storytelling, performed annually and evolving with each iteration. The 2025 edition, Ent Dat Nice, marked fifty years of this unbroken tradition, staged at the Central Bank Auditorium with performances on 11 and 12 October to packed and celebratory houses. In the same period, he has run the Carnival Talk Tent — a companion event in which calypsonians are invited to talk rather than sing, exploring the intersection of music, speech, and social commentary in the Trinidad Carnival tradition.

Keens-Douglas has always resisted the label of 'Trinidadian' artist, insisting on his identity as a regional one. 'I moved right up the islands from Guyana straight to St Croix,' he has said. 'All the islands celebrate the same culture, so I never depended on Trinidad alone.' This regional philosophy — genuinely CARICOM in its orientation — has made him a cultural ambassador in the fullest sense: not just for one island, but for the entire Eastern Caribbean tradition.

Characters, Books, and the Caribbean Literary Landscape

At the heart of Keens-Douglas's creative universe is a cast of iconic fictional characters who have become fixtures in Caribbean folklore: Tanti at de Oval, Vibert, Timultaneous, Sugar George, Tingalae, Bobots, and Dr Ah-Ah. These characters inhabit the streets, markets, panyards, and cricket grounds of the Caribbean with a richness and specificity that has made them as recognisable as real neighbours — yet they live in the heightened space where humour meets social truth.

The work that launched him was Tanti at the Oval (1975) — his first foray into dialect writing, published as a book and recorded as an album, which established his voice as one of radical authenticity in a literary culture still navigating its relationship to Standard English and colonial convention.

'Tanti at the Oval' was subsequently included in A Quiet Hush, the MCC's anthology of cricket verse — a remarkable crossover into the most English of sporting literary traditions. His stories have also appeared in Peepal Press's The Bowling Was Superfine, ArtsEtcInc.'s Shouts from the Outfield, and Macmillan's Caribbean Lives: Brian Lara.

As a self-published author and independent producer, Keens-Douglas has to his credit nine volumes of work, fifteen albums, three videos, sixteen CDs, and two DVDs — an extraordinary output built entirely outside the mainstream publishing infrastructure. His work has been featured on the BBC, on Canadian and American radio and television, and throughout Caribbean media, and has been translated and published in German and French Creole. His collection Tanti at de Oval has also been translated into Japanese by writer Chikae Taniguchi — a measure of how far the specificity of his Caribbean vernacular can travel when embodied with enough truth and craft.

Broadcasting, Advertising, and Keensdee Productions

Before the stage defined him, Keens-Douglas built a career in broadcast media and advertising. He worked as a radio announcer for Rediffusion Network and Radio Trinidad, developing the vocal authority and audience sensibility that would later animate his live performances. He served as a former Creative Director with McCann-Erickson (Trinidad) Ltd — one of the world's leading advertising networks — developing creative concepts, programmes, promotions, and events planning for a variety of national and regional clients.

He founded Creola, his theatrical production company, to stage his own shows in a Caribbean context where publicists and agents were not yet the norm. 'Back then in the Caribbean, we didn't have publicists and agents,' he has said. 'You became a one-man show in order to produce your stuff.' He later established Keensdee Productions Ltd, which focuses on management and staff training with an emphasis on inter-personal and cross-cultural communication — a natural extension of a career built on the power of language and human connection.

Film, National Geographic, and Disaster Preparedness Radio

Keens-Douglas's storytelling abilities have extended into film and documentary production. His film credits include the wildlife documentary Vampires, Devilbirds & Spirits — a production that won a National Geographic-Natural World award, placing his work within the international documentary canon. He also created When Winds Blow, a unique radio series on disaster preparedness that brought his gift for accessible, vernacular communication to one of the most practically important issues facing Caribbean small island states.

Honours, Poet Laureate, and Regional Recognition

The formal recognition of Paul Keens-Douglas's contribution to Caribbean culture has accumulated steadily across more than five decades. He is the recipient of the Beryl McBurnie Foundation for the Arts Award — named for the legendary Trinidadian dancer and arts pioneer — the Zora Neale Hurston Folklore Award, and the Hummingbird Silver Medal for Cultural Contributions, one of Trinidad and Tobago's highest national honours. He was named Trinidad and Tobago's Poet Laureate from 2017 through 2019. The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, awarded him an honorary doctorate — the source of his 'Dr' title — in recognition of his lifetime contribution to Caribbean literature and oral arts. And in 2025, at Carifesta XV in Barbados, he received the Carifesta Award for his lifetime contribution to regional arts.

In Voices in the Century — a special millennium edition of the CARICOM Perspective — Keens-Douglas and Jamaica's Louise Bennett were singled out as the two figures who had most shaped the course of Caribbean cultural development in the twentieth century. It is the most fitting of comparisons: like Miss Lou in Jamaica, Keens-Douglas in Trinidad built an entire artistic tradition on the proposition that the language people actually speak is literature — and that the stories they tell each other under mango trees are as worthy of a stage, a book, and an international audience as anything written in London or Paris.

Highlights

At a Glance

Celebrated Caribbean storyteller and poet with over fifty years shaping regional cultural identity.

Served as Trinidad and Tobago’s Poet Laureate from 2017 to 2019.

Received the 2025 Carifesta Award for lifetime contributions to Caribbean arts and literature.

Created the iconic Tim Tim Show, sustaining Caribbean oral traditions for five decades.

Authored nine books and produced numerous albums, videos, CDs, and cultural recordings.

Honoured with Trinidad and Tobago’s Hummingbird Silver Medal for outstanding cultural contributions.

Founded Keensdee Productions, promoting communication, management training, and cross-cultural understanding across the Caribbean.

Recognised alongside Louise Bennett as a defining voice of twentieth-century Caribbean culture.

Join the network that connects leaders across borders, industries, and generations.

Meet All Ambassadors