Sharma Taylor
A lawyer by profession, a writer by passion, Sharma Taylor was the inaugural winner of the 2019 Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers Prize (for fiction) for emerging writers, administered by the Bocas Lit Fest in Trinidad and Tobago and Arvon in the UK. She was also the winner of the 22nd annual Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Award in 2020, sponsored by the Central Bank of Barbados. Her work has been previously shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and longlisted in Mslexia’s 2019 Women’s Flash Fiction Competition. She won the gold medal three times in Barbados’s annual National Independence Festival of Creative Arts (NIFCA) Literary Competition, as well as the Best Adult Short Story Writer Award in 2019 in the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission’s (JCDC) Jamaica Creative Writing Competition. Sharma’s stories have been published in a number of anthologies and journals, including The Caribbean Writer and the Jamaica Journal.
"I let the main character tell me what she wanted told"
2020-06-04"I write so that my characters’ stories can get out there into the world, and so readers can find in the stories something that connects with them and which maybe makes them rethink things in their own life and ultimately have more empathy and compassion for themselves and others." Sharma Taylor’s short story has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
