Name Jacob Ross | ||
Jacob Ross: Pynter Bender 1: intro, Caribbean writers, love, memory, women, history
Jacob Ross is a Grenada-born poet, playwright, journalist, novelist and creative writing tutor, based in the UK.
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Life and career
Ross was born in Grenada and studied at the University of Grenoble, France. Since 1984 he has been residing in Britain. He was formerly an Editor of Artrage, an Intercultural Arts magazine, and is now Associate Fiction Editor at Peepal Tree Press and Associate Editor of SABLE Literary Magazine. He has judged the Scott Moncrieff Prize (for French translation), the V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize (2008) and the Tom-Gallon Trust Award (2009).
Jacob Ross has toured and lectured widely, including in Germany, Korea, the Middle East, and The Caribbean. In 2000 he was specially commissioned by the Peabody Trust to run the Millennium Writers Master class and in November that year became writer in residence for the London Borough of Streatham's Community Zone Literature Development Initiative. He was Writer-in-Residence at St. George's University in Grenada and the Darat Al Funun Arts Academy in Jordan in 2001.
Writing
In 1986 his first collection of short stories, Song for Simone, was published and was described as "one of the most powerful crystallisation of Caribbean childhood since George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin." Song of Simone has been translated into several languages. Of Ross's second collection, A Way to Catch the Dust and Other Stories (1999), Bernardine Evaristo wrote in Wasafiri: "These stories are refined, timeless and startlingly beautiful and if Walcott is the poet laureate of the Caribbean Sea then with this collection, Ross becomes a major contender as its chief prose stylist.... Ross, following in the tradition of Hemingway and Morrison, displays all the brilliance of a great storyteller in action."
His first novel, Pynter Bender, was published in 2008. It was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (2009), the Society of Authors "Best First Novel" and the Caribbean Review of Books "Book of the Year".
Awards and recognition
In 2006 Ross was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He received Grenada’s highest literary award for his contribution to literature in 2011. Jacob Ross recently won an Arts Council of England Award for his current novel-in-progress, The Village Above the Wind.