List Of Writers
HARRIS, MAGGIE
Email: maggie729@btinternet.com
Website: http://www.maggieharris.co.uk/
Maggie Harris was born in Guyana in 1954 and has lived in the UK since 1971, moving to Carmarthenshire, Wales, in 2006.
A writer, poet and artist, she won the Guyana Prize for Literature 2000 for her first collection of poetry Limbolands. Other prizes and bursaries include TS Eliot at Kent University, Kent’s Outstanding Adult Learner, South–East and East England Arts Council Awards (including Year of the Artist and awards for new writing), Leverhulme Research, Barbados, and Meridian TV for recorded poetry. A short story ’Red Gloves Waving’ was short–listed for the Asham Award. She has recently been awarded a Fellowship at Southampton University for 9 months, and has won 2nd prize in the Kingston University Press Life-Writing Competition for her second memoir Being Caribbean in Carmarthenshire (work in progress).
Residencies include Muse, Representing Kent in Europe, Broadstairs Folk Week Poet, Poet at Saga Building, Architecture Week. Maggie has had her short stories published by Virago (Short Circuits), Barbados, University West Indies (Poui), Mango Season and Urban Fox Press. She has also written for Poetry Anthologies and Journals include Agenda, Wasafiri, The shoP, Calabash, Poetry Review newsletter, Poetry Wales and the Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse. Maggie is currently working on a memoir of a Guyanese childhood, The Conch Shell, funded by a Arts Council South-East Award.
Her projects include liasons and community work through Glyndebourne Opera, Thanet & Canterbury District/City Council, Arts Councils, Kent Arts & Libraries, Music for Change, Refugee Associations, St Lucian Association, South Bank Centre, New Moves, Loop Dance Company, The National Trust & Sissinghurst Castle Gardens.
Artistic Liasons include dance and musical liasons, lyric writing, visual art, disability arts. She appeared on television on Meridian TV Masterclass and has worked as a Reader Development Worker for Kent Arts & Libraries and Creative Director for Inscribing The Island Literature Festival, Thanet. Maggie has performed in the UK, across Europe, in Ireland and also the Caribbean. She also has workshop experience with both adults and children.
Maggie is currently working with Creative Partnerships in Essex to introduce Caribbean writing through the Windrush Experience in a primary school. After taking a break from running the Inscribing the Island Literature Festival in Kent, she will be organising a Caribbean Houseparty in West Wales at the Ceridwen Centre (www.ceridwencentre.co.uk).
Selected Publications:
Poetry:
Limbolands (Mango Publishing, 1999) (www.mangoprint.com/)
From Berbice to Broadstairs (Mango Publishing, 2006)
Cassette:
The Limbowalkers
CDs:
Listen to de riddum
Anansi meets Miss Muffet (for children, East England Arts Award)
Prose:
The Conch Shell (forthcoming)
Being Caribbean in Carmarthenshire (forthcoming)