About the Award
Established in 2000 the Bridget Jones Award is awarded annually to an early career or established Caribbean arts practitioner based in any part of the Caribbean to facilitate their engagement with scholarship and UK-based scholars of the Caribbean through presentation of their work at the annual conference of the Society for Caribbean Studies.
Twenty years later the conference has had the pleasure of playing UK host to outstanding Caribbean artistes usually based across the region. Previous Bridget Jones award winners include Erna Brodber, Kei Miller, and Olive Lewin of Jamaica, Amilcar Sanatan and Hazel Franco of Trinidad and Tobago, Kendal Hippolyte of St Lucia, Annalee Davis of Barbados, Katie Numer Usher of Belize, Kit-Ling Tjon Pian Gi of Suriname and Daisy Rubiera Castillo and Felix Kindelan Delis of Cuba.
In memory of the late Bridget Jones, a Caribbean literary scholar and long-time supporter of the Society, in Bridget’s memory we offer a travel and accommodation bursary plus full conference fees to enable an arts practitioner from any part of the Caribbean to present their work to our members in a dedicated session at the Society’s annual conference.
About Bridget Jones
Bridget Jones (20 November 1935 – 4 April 2000) was a British literary academic who pioneered the inclusion of Caribbean literature in European university studies programs. While teaching French literature at the University of the West Indies, Jones developed an interest in French Caribbean writing and developed one of the first PhD curricula focused on francophone Caribbean literature. Upon returning to England, she taught at the University of Reading and the Roehampton InstituteHow to apply
List of recipients of the Bridget Jones Award:
2022
Cinemawon
2020/2021
2019
Hazel Franco
2018
2017
Jean Philippe Moiseau
2016
Wayne ‘Poonka’ Willock on Tuk Band Music of Barbados
2015
Kishan Munroe, visual artist, Bahamas
Discover his work here: http://kishanmunroe.blogspot.co.uk/#!
2014
O’Neil Lawrence, photographer, Jamaica
Details of his work are available here: http://oneillawrence.com/
2013
Kit-Ling Tjon Pian Gi, visual artist, Suriname
View her work here: http://kitlingtjonpiangi.net/
2012
Daisy Rubiera Castillo, writer and historian, Cuba.
Daisy Rubiera Castillo, the recipient of the 2012 Bridget Jones Award, was born in Santiago de Cuba in 1939. A writer, researcher and historian, she is perhaps best known for her groundbreaking testimonial biography recording the remarkable life of her mother, published as Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century (1997). Daisy has continued to work on important oral history projects, recording the lives of ordinary Cubans living through the Revolution. Her work has explored in particular what it means to be black and female in Cuba, and she has published widely on aspects of Afro-Cuban culture, gender, and memory. Her Bridget Jones presentation, ‘Black Female Voices in Cuban Art and Literature’ will reflect on the representation of black women in Cuba through a focus on the arts, providing a counter-discourse to the marginalisation of black women in official historiography.
2011
Annalee Davis, Visual Artist, Barbados.
Annalee is a Barbadian Visual Artist producing installations, building objects and more recently, working with video. She has been described as ‘one of the region’s most important and innovative artists whose work speaks directly to many of the Caribbean’s most pressing issues’. Her work exposes tensions within the larger context of a post-colonial Caribbean history and observes the nature of post-independent nation states. She explores notions of home, longing and belonging, questions the parameters that define who belong (and who doesn’t) and is concerned with issues surrounding the shifting landscapes of the archipelago. Her work is both visually and politically challenging, and has recently stimulated critical discussion about Caribbean integration and the vulnerable position of migrants within the region. She has exhibited her work throughout the Caribbean and internationally since 1989. Her 2011 Bridget Jones lecture was entitled ‘Has the Plantation Complex Fallen?’
2010
Erna Brodber, writer and academic, Jamaica.
Jamaican academic and novelist, Erna Brodber, has done pioneering research on Caribbean oral histories and helped to bring nation languages into the mainstream of world literature. Erna holds a Jamaican Musgrave Gold Award for Literature and Orature, and her novel Myal won the Caribbean and Canadian section of the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Her 2010 Bridget Jones lecture was entitled ‘History in the Service of Community Development’.
2009
Carolyn Allen, theatre director, writer, performer and scholar, Jamaica.
In her career as a theatre director, writer, performer and scholar, Carolyn Allen has made a substantial contribution to the Caribbean arts well beyond the shores of her native Jamaica. Her 2009 conference presentation, ‘Break the Waters of the Deep…Set the Echoes Free’, discussed a multi-media collage of testimony and imaginative interpretation of the experience of capture and crossing.
2008
André Eugene, artist, sculptor and one of the founders of the Grand Rue Artists’ Collective in Port au Prince, Haiti.
2007
Kendal Hippolyte, poet, social critic and performance artist, St Lucia.
2006
Kei Miller, poet and short story writer, author of ‘Kingdom of Empty Bellies’ (The Heaventree Press 2005), Jamaica.
2005
Rosina Santana Castellón, visual artist, public art project on Vieques, Puerto Rico.
2004
Dr. Olive Lewin is a Jamaican author, social anthropologist, musicologist, and teacher. Dr. Lewin is probably best known for her recorded anthologies of old Jamaica folk songs, researched and collected over her lifetime. Olive Lewin studied music and ethnomusicology in the United Kingdom. She is a Fellow of Trinity College, London, and an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal School of Music. She has also held the position of Director of Arts and Culture at the office of the Prime Minister of Jamaica as well as that of Director of the Jamaica Institute of Folk Culture. Since 1983 she has directed the Jamaica Orchestra for Youth.
2003
Dr Felix Kindelan Delis, researcher in Afro-Cuban cultural forms, Cuba.
2002
Stanley Greaves, fine artist, Guyana.
2001
Elizabeth Watson, Media Librarian of UWI, Cave Hill, Barbados.