Place of birth
Trinidad and Tobago
Place of residence
Trinidad and Tobago
National identity
Trinidad and Tobago
DOB
Gender
Female

Barbara Jenkins

Short biography
Barbara Jenkins was born in Trinidad. She began writing in her seventies, and is the author of a novel, a collection of short stories and now a memoir, The Stranger Who Was Myself. She has won awards including the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Caribbean Region), the Wasafiri New Writing Prize, The Canute Brodhurst Prize, the Small Axe short story competition, My African Diaspora Short Story Contest and a Guyana Prize for Literature.

Barbara Jenkins was born in Trinidad. She studied at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, and at the University College, Cardiff. She married a fellow student, and they continued to live in Wales through the whole decade of the sixties. In the early seventies they returned to Trinidad.

Since she started writing in 2008, her stories have won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize Caribbean Region in 2010 and 2011; the Wasafiri New Writing Prize; The Canute Brodhurst Prize for short fiction, The Caribbean Writer; the Small Axe short story competition, 2011; the Romance Category, My African Diaspora Short Story Contest; and the inaugural The Caribbean Communications Network (CCN) Prize for a film review of the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, 2012. In 2013 she was named winner of the inaugural Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize. Her debut short story collection, Sic Transit Wagon (Peepal Tree, 2013) was awarded the Guyana Prize for Literature Caribbean Award. Her debut novel, De Rightest Place (Peepal Tree, 2018) was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Christopher Bland Prize.

She completed her MFA at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad, in 2012. She spends her time reading, writing, singing in a choir, serving on the boards of two NGOs and seeing in person and virtually her globally-scattered three children and nine grandchildren.