Sharma Taylor, a Jamaican writer and lawyer, was awarded the 2023 Institute of Jamaica’s Musgrave Bronze Medal for her contribution to Literature, and the University of the West Indies (Mona Campus) appointed her its Writer-in-Residence for semester II, 2024. Her work has won the 2020 Wasafiri Queen Mary New Writing Prize, the 2020 Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Award, and the 2019 Bocas Lit Fest’s Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers Prize. Also, she has been shortlisted four times for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
She was a judge in the 2022 and 2024 The Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition organized by the Royal Commonwealth Society, the 2023 Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival (BCLF) Short Fiction Story Contest for Writers in the Caribbean, and she was on the jury for the 2023 Bocas Lit Fest Breakthrough Fellowships. Her debut novel, What a Mother’s Love Don’t Teach You, was published in 2022 in the UK and the Commonwealth by Virago Press.