WOMEX 2026 honours Luzmila Carpio and a Cameroonian prison label
The world music expo in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria closed with WOMEX Awards for Bolivian singer Luzmila Carpio and Jail Time Records.
Archive image · Photo: Michael Coghlan from Adelaide, Australia / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 (cropped and resized)
The 32nd WOMEX ended with Sunday's midday award ceremony at the Auditorio Alfredo Kraus in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Organisers counted more than 2,500 professionals from 90 countries; in 2027 the expo moves to Tenerife. The Artist Award went to Quechua singer Luzmila Carpio from Bolivia's Altiplano, who has performed for six decades, released more than 25 albums and worked with Miriam Makeba and Cesária Évora, among others.
"Un pueblo que no canta, un pueblo que no baila, es un pueblo muerto" ("A people that does not sing or dance is a dead people"), Carpio said on stage. The Professional Excellence Award went to Jail Time Records, a label founded in 2018 by Dione Roach and Steve Happi inside the New Bell central prison in Douala, Cameroon, where inmates record hip-hop, trap, drill and afro-house. Emily Dust, who presented the award, called it an "instrumento de resistencia".