Mary Chamberlain (born 3 September 1947) is a British novelist and historian. She has been largely collected by libraries worldwide. [1]
Mary Chamberlain (born 3 September 1947) is a British novelist and historian. She has been largely collected by libraries worldwide. [1]
Chamberlain was born 3 September 1947 in South London, [2] and holds degrees from the University of Edinburgh, The London School of Economics and Political Science, and Royal Holloway, University of London.
She is married to the political scientist Stein Ringen. [3] Chamberlain was previously married to Carey Harrison. [4]
Chamberlain is Emeritus Professor of History, at Oxford Brookes University. [5] Her book Fenwomen. Portrait of Women in an English Village was the first book published by Virago Press in 1975, [6] and pioneered the use of oral history in the study of women’s history. It was also the inspiration for the Joint Stock production of Caryl Churchill’s award-winning play Fen (1983). [7] Fenwomen was followed by two further books on women’s history: Old Wives’ Tales: Their History, Remedies and Spells and Growing Up In Lambeth.
From 1987 to 1991, she lived in Barbados, and began working in Caribbean history. Using oral history, she published two pioneering studies of migration and families, Narratives of Exile and Return [8] and Family Love in the Diaspora: Migration and the Anglo Caribbean Experience, [9] and a further study of decolonization, Empire and Nation-building in the Caribbean: Barbados 1937–1966. [10]
Chamberlain is widely considered one of the founders of oral history, [11] was the reviews editor of the Oral History Journal from 1977 to 1987 and co-founder of the London History Workshop Centre. [12] She is the author of many articles on women's history, oral history and Caribbean history, has edited a number of books, and was a founding editor or the series Memory and Narrative. She has served on editorial, advisory and government committees, [13] and held visiting professorships at the University of the West Indies (1995, 2004), and New York University (2004). She has been the recipient of a number of research awards and is an adviser to the National Life Story Collection at the British Library [14] and the Raphael Samuel History Centre. [15]
National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview (C1149/27) with Mary Chamberlain in 2012 for its Oral History of Oral History collection held by the British Library. [16]
Her UK debut novel The Dressmaker of Dachau was published in 2015, and has sold to 19 countries. She credits the inspiration for the story to two of her aunts, of whom one left the family and ran away, and the other was imprisoned by the Nazi regime during the Second World War. [17] Other fiction works include 'The Hidden' in 2019, and 'The Forgotten' in 2021, 'The Lie' in 2023 all published by Oneworld. She is also the author of an earlier novel set in the Caribbean, The Mighty Jester.
Chamberlain was one of the London Recruits, a group of young people recruited by the African National Congress (ANC) in the 1960s and 1970s to smuggle ANC and SACP literature into South Africa after the ANC had been decimated by the Rivonia trials of 1963/4. [18] [4] [19]
Chamberlain was awarded an honorary Doctorate (D.Litt) by the University of East Anglia in 2021
Oral history is the collection and study of historical information about people, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. These interviews are conducted with people who participated in or observed past events and whose memories and perceptions of these are to be preserved as an aural record for future generations. Oral history strives to obtain information from different perspectives and most of these cannot be found in written sources. Oral history also refers to information gathered in this manner and to a written work based on such data, often preserved in archives and large libraries. Knowledge presented by Oral History (OH) is unique in that it shares the tacit perspective, thoughts, opinions and understanding of the interviewee in its primary form.
The slave narrative is a type of literary genre involving the (written) autobiographical accounts of enslaved Africans, particularly in the Americas. Over six thousand such narratives are estimated to exist; about 150 narratives were published as separate books or pamphlets. In the United States during the Great Depression (1930s), more than 2,300 additional oral histories on life during slavery were collected by writers sponsored and published by the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal program. Most of the 26 audio-recorded interviews are held by the Library of Congress.
Indentured servitude is a form of labor in which a person is contracted to work without salary for a specific number of years. The contract, called an "indenture", may be entered "voluntarily" for purported eventual compensation or debt repayment, or it may be imposed "involuntarily" as a judicial punishment. Historically, it has been used to pay for apprenticeships, typically when an apprentice agreed to work for free for a master tradesman to learn a trade. Later it was also used as a way for a person to pay the cost of transportation to colonies in the Americas.
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Indo-Caribbeans or Indian-Caribbeans are people in the Caribbean who are descendants of the Jahaji indentured laborers from India and the wider subcontinent, who were brought by the British, Dutch, and French during the colonial era from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century. A minority of them are descendants from people who immigrated as entrepreneurs, businesspeople, merchants, engineers, doctors, religious leaders and other professional occupations beginning in the mid-20th century.
Dame Carmen Thérèse Callil, was an Australian publisher, writer and critic who spent most of her career in the United Kingdom. She founded Virago Press in 1973 and received the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature in 2017. She has been described by Gail Rebuck as "the most extraordinary publisher of her generation".
Caribbean literature is the literature of the various territories of the Caribbean region. Literature in English from the former British West Indies may be referred to as Anglo-Caribbean or, in historical contexts, as West Indian literature. Most of these territories have become independent nations since the 1960s, though some retain colonial ties to the United Kingdom. They share, apart from the English language, a number of political, cultural, and social ties which make it useful to consider their literary output in a single category. The more wide-ranging term "Caribbean literature" generally refers to the literature of all Caribbean territories regardless of language—whether written in English, Spanish, French, Hindustani, or Dutch, or one of numerous creoles.
Paule Marshall was an American writer, best known for her 1959 debut novel Brown Girl, Brownstones. In 1992, at the age of 63, Marshall was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship grant.
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Frances-Anne Solomon is an English-Caribbean-Canadian filmmaker, writer, producer, and distributor. She has lived in Britain, Barbados and Toronto, Canada.
Hakim Adi is a British historian and scholar who specializes in African affairs. He is the first African-British historian to become a professor of history in the UK. He has written widely on Pan-Africanism and the modern political history of Africa and the African diaspora, including the 2018 book Pan-Africanism: A History. Currently a professor at the University of Chichester, Adi is an advocate of the education curriculum including the history of Africa and its diaspora.
George William Lamming OCC was a Barbadian novelist, essayist, and poet. He first won critical acclaim for In the Castle of My Skin, his 1953 debut novel. He also held academic posts, including as a distinguished visiting professor at Duke University and a visiting professor in the Africana Studies Department of Brown University, and lectured extensively worldwide.
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Barbadian British people, Bajan Brits or British Barbadians, are citizens or residents of the United Kingdom whose ethnic origins lie fully or partially in the Caribbean island of Barbados. The UK is home to the second largest Barbadian-born migrant population out of all the OECD countries, with the 2001 Census recording 21,601 UK residents born on the Caribbean island, compared to the 53,785 Barbadian-born residents of the United States.
Alison Light, is a writer, critic and independent scholar. She is the author of five books to date. In 2020 A Radical Romance, was awarded the Pen Ackerley prize, the only prize for memoir in the UK. Common People: The History of an English Family (2014) was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize. She has held a number of academic posts and is currently an Honorary Fellow in History and English at Pembroke College, Oxford. She is also an Honorary Professor in the Department of English, University College, London and an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Department of English, Edinburgh University. She is a founding member of the Raphael Samuel Archive and History Centre in London.
Margaret Yvonne Busby,, Hon. FRSL, also known as Nana Akua Ackon, is a Ghanaian-born publisher, editor, writer and broadcaster, resident in the UK. She was Britain's youngest and first black female book publisher when she and Clive Allison (1944–2011) co-founded the London-based publishing house Allison and Busby in the 1960s. She edited the anthology Daughters of Africa (1992), and its 2019 follow-up New Daughters of Africa. She is a recipient of the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature. In 2020 she was voted one of the "100 Great Black Britons". In 2021, she was honoured with the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2023, Busby was named as president of English PEN.
Stella Dadzie is a British educationalist, activist, writer and historian. She is best known for her involvement in the UK's Black Women's Movement, being a founding member of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) in the 1970s, and co-authoring with Suzanne Scafe and Beverley Bryan in 1985 the book The Heart of the Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain. In 2020, Verso published a new book by Dadzie, A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery & Resistance.
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