(1942 on)

Barbara Jenkins was born in Belmont, Trinidad. She studied in Wales, returning to Trinidad in the early 1970s. After retiring as a secondary school geography teacher, she joined a writers’ group in 2007 and graduated from the MFA creative writing programme at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine in 2012. Her short stories have been published in various journals and anthologies and she has won several international prizes. Her debut collection of short stories, Sic Transit Wagon and Other Stories, was published in 2013, winning the 2014 Guyana Prize for Caribbean Literature for the best book of fiction. Published in 2018, De Rightest Place has been likened in setting to a Trinidadian Cheers. Her memoir, The Stranger Who Was Myself, is published in 2022 as she turns eighty.

I first came across Barbara’s work when she won the Wasafiri New Writing Prize in 2010 for life writing, and it was clear then that here was a talent to watch. She hasn’t disappointed!

Sharmilla Beezmohun

Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Jenkins

Photo by Arnaldo James