Barbara Jenkins blogs about winning the Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize 2013

I am very, very gratified about winning, on several counts…The first is that I’m new to writing, to creative writing. I started in a small, amateurish way with a couple of female friends, all three of us retired schoolteachers, just six years ago.

Secondly, I had the good fortune to be encouraged to submit stories for international competitions.  Many of the stories won. I was propelled by that early success to enrol in the MFA programme at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad and to graduate in the shortest possible time. So, very quickly, I began to see myself, not as a retired schoolteacher, but as an emerging…