1. Marina Salandy-Brown was formerly an editor and Senior Manager in Radio and News and Current Affairs programmes with the British Broadcasting Corporation in London, one of the BBC's few top executives from an ethnic minority background.
14 Facts About Marina Salandy-Brown
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Marina Salandy-Brown is the founder and inaugural director of the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, held annually in Trinidad and Tobago since 2011, "the biggest literary festival in the Anglophone Caribbean", and of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.
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Marina Salandy-Brown was co-founder of the Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize.
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In 2020, Salandy-Brown received the Ferdinand Magellan Award from Chile, and was elected an Honorary Fellow of the United Kingdom's Royal Society of Literature.
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At the age of 17, Marina Salandy-Brown left Trinidad and migrated to Britain to attend university.
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Marina Salandy-Brown was a governor of the University of Westminster, a member of the Arts Council Literature panel, and a former trustee of the Koestler Awards to support and fund Arts in prisons in the UK.
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Marina Salandy-Brown is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
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In January 2022, Marina Salandy-Brown announced that she was "passing on the baton" to Nicholas Laughlin to serve in the roles of festival and programme director, while she remains as president of Bocas.
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Marina Salandy-Brown was a contributor to the book Caribbean Dispatches: Beyond the Tourist Dream, compiled and edited by Jane Bryce, and, more recently, to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.
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In 1988, Marina Salandy-Brown won the Sony Silver Award for Most Creative Use of Radio, and 1994 she was named Radio Journalist of the Year.
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Marina Salandy-Brown won Programme of the Year, UK Television and Radio Industries Club, in 1990, and a Sony Gold Award, Best News Programme in 2000 for BBC Radio.
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In October 2020, an award was conferred on Marina Salandy-Brown marking the 500th anniversary of Ferdinand Magellan's first circumnavigation of the world, in recognition of her work founding the Bocas Lit Fest, promoting art and literature throughout the Caribbean, and exploring other cultures.
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Marina Salandy-Brown was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020, the 200th anniversary of the RSL's founding.
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Alongside the Bocas Lit Fest that she founded, Marina Salandy-Brown was celebrated by the International Women's Forum in the "Ideas Remaking the World" segment of IWF's World Leadership Conference in November 2021.