Cherie Jones | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1974 |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Notable work | The One-Armed Sister Sweeps The House (2021) |
Cherie Jones (born 1974) is a Barbadian writer. Her debut novel, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House , was shortlisted for the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction. [1] [2]
Cherie Jones was born in 1974. [3] [4]
She received her LLB from the University of the West Indies in 1995 and was admitted to the Bar in Barbados in 1997. [3] [4] She continues to work as a lawyer, in addition to her writing. [4] [5] [6]
In 2015, Jones graduated from the Master of Arts writing program at Sheffield Hallam University, where she received the Archie Markham Award and the A.M. Heath Prize. [3] [7] [8] She went on to complete a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. [5] [9] [10] [11]
Jones is a single mother of four children and has spoken openly about being a survivor of domestic violence. [5] [12] [13] [14]
Jones won the Commonwealth Short Story Competition in 1999 with her story "Bride". [3] [6]
In 2003, she won second place in the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Awards for unpublished manuscripts for her short story collection The Burning Bush Women & Other Stories. [15] [16] The collection was published in 2004 by Peepal Tree Press. [17] [18]
In 2016, Jones won third place in the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Awards for her unpublished interlinked short story collection Water for the End of the World. [4] [6] [19]
In 2021, Jones published her debut novel, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House . The novel is set in 1984 in the fictional town of Baxter's Beach in Barbados. The title is from a cautionary tale in which a girl disobeys her mother and has to lose her arm to escape the consequences. The main protagonist is Lala, who works as a hair-braider for tourists and is trapped in an abusive marriage to petty criminal Adan. On the night Lala gives birth, Adan is involved in the murder of a rich white tourist. The novel describes the brutal aftermath and the violent backstory of Lala and other characters. It uses multiple viewpoints, including a police detective and the murdered man's widow, and examines issues of race, inequality, and cycles of abuse and domestic violence. [5] [20] [21] [22]
The novel was the Good Morning America monthly book club pick in February 2021. [5] [14] [23] It was shortlisted for the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction [24] and the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. [25] The German translation, Wie die einarmige Schwester das Haus fegt, translated by Karen Gerwig, was shortlisted for the 2023 International Literature Award. [10] [26] The French translation, Et d'un seul bras la sœur balaie sa maison, translated by Jessica Shapiro, won the Prix Carbet des lycéens 2023. [10] [27] [28]
Notable Previous Exeter PhDs with major publication success in fiction and poetry include: Ruth Gilligan, Cherie Jones, Jane Feaver, Helena Drysdale, Ben Smith, Luke Kennard, Isabel Galleymore, Eleanor Rees, and many others.