Jacob Ross | |
---|---|
Born | 1956 (age 67–68) Hope Vale, Grenada |
Education | Grenada Boys' Secondary School |
Alma mater | University of Grenoble |
Occupation(s) | Poet, playwright, journalist, novelist and creative writing tutor |
Notable work | The Bone Readers (2016) |
Awards | Jhalak Prize |
Jacob Ross FRSL (born 1956) [1] is a Grenada-born poet, playwright, journalist, novelist and creative writing tutor, based in the UK since 1984. [2]
Jacob Ross was born in Hope Vale [3] on the Caribbean island of Grenada, where he attended the Grenada Boys' Secondary School, later studying at the University of Grenoble, France. [4] Since 1984 he has resided in Britain. [2] He was formerly an editor of Artrage, an intercultural arts magazine, and is now associate fiction editor at Peepal Tree Press and associate editor of SABLE Literary Magazine. He has judged the Scott Moncrieff Prize (for French translation), the V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize (2008) and the Tom-Gallon Trust Award (2009). [5]
Ross has toured and lectured widely, including in Germany, Korea, the Middle East, and The Caribbean. [6] In 2000, he was specially commissioned by the Peabody Trust to run the Millennium Writers Master class and in November that year became writer in residence for the London Borough of Streatham's Community Zone Literature Development Initiative. [7] He was Writer-in-Residence at St. George's University in Grenada and the Darat Al Funun Arts Academy in Jordan in 2001. [6]
In 1986 his first collection of short stories, Song for Simone, was published and was described as "one of the most powerful crystallisation of Caribbean childhood since George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin ." [8] Song of Simone has been translated into several languages. [9] Of Ross's second collection, A Way to Catch the Dust and Other Stories (1999), Bernardine Evaristo wrote in Wasafiri : "These stories are refined, timeless and startlingly beautiful and if Walcott is the poet laureate of the Caribbean Sea then with this collection, Ross becomes a major contender as its chief prose stylist.... Ross, following in the tradition of Hemingway and Morrison, displays all the brilliance of a great storyteller in action." [10]
His first novel, Pynter Bender, was published in 2008. It was shortlisted for 2009's Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Society of Authors' "Best First Novel" and the Caribbean Review of Books "Book of the Year". [5] Ross is also the editor of Closure: Contemporary Black British Short Stories, published by Peepal Tree Press. [5]
His second novel, The Bone Readers , was published in 2016 was awarded the inaugural Jhalak Prize. [5]
In November 2017, Ross published his collected stories, Tell No-One About This. David Constantine wrote:
Such good writing! A truthful examination of our fraught, unsteady and ambivalent relations with one another and with the world we live in. Jacob Ross writes out of an intense and loving knowledge of particular places. His writing is unsentimental, clear-sighted, urgently insistent on the possibility of more humane dealings. And his lyricism, the making of beautiful sentences, is always an answering back against the fear that we may never do better than we are doing now. [11]
Kwame Senu Neville Dawes is a Ghanaian poet, actor, editor, critic, musician, and former Louis Frye Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina. He is now Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and editor-in-chief at Prairie Schooner magazine.
Nii Ayikwei Parkes, born in the United Kingdom to parents from Ghana, where he was raised, is a performance poet, writer, publisher and sociocultural commentator. He is one of 39 writers aged under 40 from sub-Saharan Africa who in April 2014 were named as part of the Hay Festival's prestigious Africa39 project. He writes for children under the name K.P. Kojo.
Kadija George, Hon. FRSL, also known as Kadija Sesay, is a British literary activist, short story writer and poet of Sierra Leonean descent, and the publisher and managing editor of the magazine SABLE LitMag. Her work has earned her many awards and nominations, including the Cosmopolitan Woman of Achievement in 1994, Candace Woman of Achievement in 1996, The Voice Community Award in Literature in 1999 and the Millennium Woman of the Year in 2000. She is the General Secretary for African Writers Abroad and organises the Writers' HotSpot – trips for writers abroad, where she teaches creative writing and journalism courses.
Jan Rynveld Carew was a Guyana-born novelist, playwright, poet and educator, who lived at various times in The Netherlands, Mexico, the UK, France, Spain, Ghana, Jamaica, Canada and the United States.
Peepal Tree Press is a publisher based in Leeds, England which publishes Caribbean, Black British, and South Asian fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama and academic books. Poet Kwame Dawes has said, "Peepal Tree Press's position as the leading publisher of Caribbean literature, and especially of Caribbean poetry, is unassailable."
Kei Miller is a Jamaican poet, fiction writer, essayist and blogger. He is also a professor of creative writing.
Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo is a British author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first Black woman to win the Booker. Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first black person to hold the role since it was founded in 1820.
Merle Collins is a Grenadian poet and short story writer.
Wasafiri is a quarterly British literary magazine covering international contemporary writing. Founded in 1984, the magazine derives its name from a Swahili word meaning "travellers" that is etymologically linked with the Arabic word "safari". The magazine holds that many of those who created the literatures in which it is particularly interested "...have all in some sense been cultural travellers either through migration, transportation or else, in the more metaphorical sense of seeking an imagined cultural 'home'." Funded by the Arts Council England, Wasafiri is "a journal of post-colonial literature that pays attention to the wealth of Black and diasporic writers worldwide. It is Britain's only international magazine for Black British, African, Asian and Caribbean literatures."
Leone Ross FRSL is a British novelist, short story writer, editor, journalist and academic, who is of Jamaican and Scottish ancestry.
The SI Leeds Literary Prize is a biennial award founded in 2012 by Soroptimist International of Leeds – a branch of the worldwide women's organization Soroptimist International – for unpublished fiction written by Black and Asian women resident in the UK. Submissions must be of more than 30,000 words of fiction and entrants must be aged 18 years and over. The prize offers support for writers to develop their work and to help build new audiences.
Joan Anim-Addo is a Grenadian-born academic, poet, playwright and publisher, who is Emeritus Professor of Caribbean Literature and Culture in the English and Creative Writing Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she co-founded with Deirdre Osborne the MA Black British Literature, the world's first postgraduate degree in this field.
Barbara Jenkins is a Trinidadian writer, whose work since 2010 has won several international prizes, including the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the Wasafiri New Writing Prize.
Susheila Nasta, MBE, Hon. FRSL, is a British critic, editor, academic and literary activist. She is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literatures at Queen Mary University of London, and founding editor of Wasafiri, the UK's leading magazine for international contemporary writing. She is a recipient of the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature.
Kevin Jared Hosein is a Caribbean novelist and short-story writer from Trinidad and Tobago. He is known for winning the 2018 Commonwealth Short Story Prize with his story "Passage". He also won the regional (Caribbean) section of the prize in 2015, with "The King of Settlement 4".
Minoli Salgado is a Sri Lankan writer and academic based in the United Kingdom who was born in Malaysia and educated mainly in England. She has written extensively on migrant studies and diasporic literature and is the author of the critically acclaimed work Writing Sri Lanka. She also writes fiction and poetry, and her debut novel A Little Dust on the Eyes won the inaugural SI Leeds Literary Prize.
Come Let Us Sing Anyway, also known as Come Let Us Sing Anyway and other short stories, is a 2017 collection of stories by British author Leone Ross. The volume marks the first time that her short stories have been collected together.
The Bone Readers is a 2016 novel by Grenadan British author Jacob Ross, the second in his "Camaho Quartet." In 2017, it won the inaugural Jhalak Prize. In 2022, The Bone Readers was included on the "Big Jubilee Read" list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors, selected to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II.
Jane Bryce is a British writer, journalist, literary and cultural critic, as well as an academic. She was born and raised in Tanzania, has lived in Italy, the UK and Nigeria, and since 1992 has been based in Barbados. Her writing for a wide range of publications has focused on contemporary African and Caribbean fiction, postcolonial cinema and creative writing, and she is Professor Emerita of African Literature and Cinema at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill.
Nick Makoha is a Ugandan poet and playwright. His writing has appeared in publications and outlets including The New York Times, Poetry Review, Rialto, Poetry London, Triquarterly Review, Boston Review, Callaloo, and Wasafiri.