debut: 2/16/17
35,103 runs
Author honored by Jamaica writes of the housemaid who inspires her
Jamaican writer and lawyer Sharma Taylor, author of What A Mother’s Love Don’t Teach You (Virago Press, 2023), will be honoured on Wednesday with the prestigious Jamaican Musgrave Medal (Bronze) for excellence in Literature. Taylor, who counts the late Wayne Brown, Jane Bryce, Dr Erna Brodber, Ingrid Persaud, Karen Lord, Monique Roffey, Kei Miller and Jacob Ross among her mentors, is no stranger to accolades. Earlier this year she was shortlisted for the V S Pritchett Short Story Prize 2024.
Tayor has been shortlisted for the hugely competitive Commonwealth Short Story Prize four times (2018, 2020, 2021, and 2022) and longlisted twice (2019 and 2023) and in 2019, won the Bocas Lit Fest’s Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers Prize. In 2020, Taylor won the Wasafiri Queen Mary New Writing Prize, the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Award, was a finalist in the Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival’s (BCLF) and placed second in the First Novel Competition (Daniel Goldsmith Associates Ltd UK). On her affinity for writing and inspiration for her debut novel What A Mother’s Love Don’t Teach You, Taylor says her first teacher was Hortense, a housemaid who “looked after her from the day she was born” when her mother was at work. “Hortense was in her early 20s and loved me like her own child–gave me the gift of spoken language by teaching me her name. When I was nearly two, Hortense disappeared, and I never heard from her again.”
Taylor says her debut novel was a process of self-discovery, “I thought about how losing someone important to you and believing you’ve found them again can change your definition of family and belonging. I thought of the secrets we keep from those we love and the secrets they keep from us.”
Currently Writer-in-Residence at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, in the Department of Literature’s Creative Writing programme, Taylor says she writes “stories she likes reading with colourful, complicated characters and distinctive Caribbean voices.” What A Mother’s Love Don’t Teach You is told from multiple perspectives in patois and English to give the reader a sense of the social context of 1980s Jamaica.
Jamaican writer and lawyer Sharma Taylor, author of What A Mother’s Love Don’t Teach You (Virago Press, 2023), will be honoured on Wednesday with the prestigious Jamaican Musgrave Medal (Bronze) for excellence in Literature. Taylor, who counts the late Wayne Brown, Jane Bryce, Dr Erna Brodber, Ingrid Persaud, Karen Lord, Monique Roffey, Kei Miller and Jacob Ross among her mentors, is no stranger to accolades. Earlier this year she was shortlisted for the V S Pritchett Short Story Prize 2024.
Tayor has been shortlisted for the hugely competitive Commonwealth Short Story Prize four times (2018, 2020, 2021, and 2022) and longlisted twice (2019 and 2023) and in 2019, won the Bocas Lit Fest’s Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers Prize. In 2020, Taylor won the Wasafiri Queen Mary New Writing Prize, the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Award, was a finalist in the Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival’s (BCLF) and placed second in the First Novel Competition (Daniel Goldsmith Associates Ltd UK). On her affinity for writing and inspiration for her debut novel What A Mother’s Love Don’t Teach You, Taylor says her first teacher was Hortense, a housemaid who “looked after her from the day she was born” when her mother was at work. “Hortense was in her early 20s and loved me like her own child–gave me the gift of spoken language by teaching me her name. When I was nearly two, Hortense disappeared, and I never heard from her again.”
Taylor says her debut novel was a process of self-discovery, “I thought about how losing someone important to you and believing you’ve found them again can change your definition of family and belonging. I thought of the secrets we keep from those we love and the secrets they keep from us.”
Currently Writer-in-Residence at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, in the Department of Literature’s Creative Writing programme, Taylor says she writes “stories she likes reading with colourful, complicated characters and distinctive Caribbean voices.” What A Mother’s Love Don’t Teach You is told from multiple perspectives in patois and English to give the reader a sense of the social context of 1980s Jamaica.
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