THE CARIBBEAN - Jamaica
A lawyer by profession, a writer by passion, Sharma was the inaugural winner of the 2019 Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers Prize (for fiction) for emerging writers, administered by the Bocas Lit Fest in Trinidad and Tobago and Arvon in the UK. She was also the winner of the 22nd annual Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Award in 2020, sponsored by the Central Bank of Barbados. Her work has been previously shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and longlisted in Mslexia’s 2019 Women’s Flash Fiction Competition. She won the gold medal three times in Barbados’ annual National Independence Festival of Creative Arts (NIFCA) Literary Competitions as well as the “Best Adult Short Story Writer” award in 2019 in the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission’s (JCDC) Jamaica Creative Writing Competition. Her stories have been published in journals such as: Adda, The Caribbean Writer, Poui: Cave Hill Journal of Creative Writing, and the Jamaica Journal and a number of anthologies including Arts Etc NIFCA Winning Words Anthology 2015/2016 and 2017/2018, and “Bearing Witness 1 and 2- The Best of the Jamaica Observer Arts Magazine 2000/2001. It has been accepted for publication in WomanSpeak, A Journal of Writing and Art by Caribbean Women (2020).