Emerging as the Caribbean winner of the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize has stunned celebrated Jamaican author and theatre director Brian Heap, who initially planned to use the competition as a spark to complete a work he had been fiddling with for five years.
Heap’s winning piece, Mafootoo, documents the encounters of a Jamaican woman who migrated to London with her husband in the 1960s.
So the story is largely about that Windrush generation in England and the kind of situation that they find themselves in old age,” said Heap, who grew up in England.
Heap went up against fellow Jamaican Sharma Taylor and Brandon McIvor from Trinidad and Tobago to secure the Caribbean prize.
But Heap, who has worked in drama and education in Jamaica for more than 40 years, is not worried.
