Barbara Jenkins was born in
San Fernando, Trinidad. She studied at the
University College of Wales,
Aberystwyth, and at
University College, Cardiff. She married a fellow student, and during the 1960s lived in Wales, returning to Trinidad in the early 1970s. She has described her successful writing career as "accidental": after she retired as a secondary school geography teacher, she joined a writers group in 2007 at the urging of a friend, and subsequently was accepted on the workshop for regional writers hosted by the Cropper Foundation. Jenkins went on to take the Master's of Fine Arts (MFA) creative writing programme at the
University of the West Indies at
St Augustine, graduating in 2012 with high commendation. Her MFA thesis formed the basis for her debut book,
Sic Transit Wagon. Her short stories have been published in journals including
Wasafiri,
The Caribbean Writer and
Small Axe, as well as in the collections
Moving Right Along: Caribbean Stories in Honour of John Cropper, eds
Funso Aiyejina and Judy Stone (Caroni, Trinidad: Lexicon, 2010),
Pepperpot: Best New Stories from the Caribbean (New York and Leeds: Peekash Press, 2014),
Trinidad Noir: The Classics, ed.
Robert Antoni (
Akashic Books, 2017), and
New Daughters of Africa, ed.
Margaret Busby (London:
Myriad Editions, 2019). Her work won several international prizes: the
Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Caribbean Region) in 2010 (for "Something from Nothing") and 2011 (for "Head Not Made for Hat Alone"), the
Wasafiri New Writing Prize; the Canute Brodhurst Prize for short fiction from
The Caribbean Writer; the
Small Axe short story competition in 2011; the Romance Category, My African Diaspora Short Story Contest; and the inaugural
Caribbean Communications Network (CCN) Prize for a film review of the
Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, 2012. Award-winning British writer
Bernardine Evaristo subsequently mentored Jenkins. Her debut collection of short stories,
Sic Transit Wagon and Other Stories, was published in 2013 by
Peepal Tree Press, and in 2015 was awarded the 2014
Guyana Prize for Caribbean Literature for the best book of fiction. She won the Bloody Scotland-Bocas Lit Fest Crime Writing Prize in 2014. An excerpt from her then novel-in-progress,
De Rightest Place, appeared in
The Caribbean Review of Books in October 2015. Published in 2018 by Peepal Tree Press,
De Rightest Place – likened in setting to a Trinidadian
Cheers – has been described as "a novel with a great deal of heart. It's a funny, moving and ultimately uplifting story". In 2019, Jenkins was shortlisted for the inaugural
RSL Christopher Bland Prize, set up by the
Royal Society of Literature to encourage and celebrate older writers first published at the age of 50 or over. ==Selected bibliography==