SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF JOCELYN WATSON
I was born and grew up in Hong Kong. I have a mixed racial heritage: my mother is Indian and my father English. The Asian Women’s Writers Collective was my first writing home. I am feminist of colour, an activist, a lesbian and a socialist. My first degree was in Chinese and Politics and I taught in China from 1984-86 and returned to Britain to study law. I went on to do a LLM at Girton College, Cambridge and practised human rights law. In 2011 inspired by the words of Doris Lessing -‘whatever you’re meant to do, do it now,’ I gave up full time employment as a human rights lawyer to write. I studied creative writing and obtained a MA. Since then, I have devoted my time, energy, and limited resources solely to writing. In 2017 I was one of the 200 contemporary writers of colour celebrated in Breaking Ground. In 2016 and 2018 I received Arts Council of England Grants to write SHAZIA & CO. I have been a winner of the Asian Writer, the Jane Austen, the Freedom from Torture, the SAMPAD and other writing prizes and my short stories have been published by Dahlia Press, Honno Welsh Women’s Press, Emerald Press, Women’s Press, and others. I have written for various magazines including Wasafiri, Red Pepper, The Survivor and Life Writing. My play ‘Cornelia Calling’ was performed at the Tristan Bates Theatre in London as part of the Kali Theatre Company Discovery Programme. Having achieved success with my short stories, I wanted to explore the craft of novel writing, which gave birth to SHAZIA & CO. I want to express the collective joy, complexity and life challenges of a diverse group of older women living in Britain. SHAZIA & CO is a love song to the fortitude of older women, and the tremendous contributions of political women, of lesbians, of working-class women, of women of colour. With time, I have appreciated more and more the powerful role literature has in enlightening and impassioning readers to better understand the world we live.
