Valda’s untitled manuscript was shortlisted for the Bath Spa Prize by Janklow and Nesbit and is being developed into her first novel. She is a Hawthornden Literary Fellow – with short stories appearing in anthologies including The Book of Bristol, Comma Press (2023), online MMXX, Bath Spa University (2022), The Peepal Tree Book of Caribbean Short Stories (2018), Closure: Contemporary Black British Short Stories (Peepal Tree Press 2015).

“Below is a link to the prose from my short film Handle with Care (II) 2023. The first version of this video was made 2016, for the ‘Literary Archaeology’, a collaborative project between literary scholar, archaeologists and creative writers. We studied human remains excavated from a burial ground for enslaved plantation workers on a Caribbean Island – bones of our ancestors, brutalised and traumatised.

My concern was how to make these bones, these remnants, more than just matter – to matter more than mere objects of scientific investigation.

Handle With Care II, is a further layering of my archival images some of which are public art commissions, and voices recalling historical narratives – summoning the anguish of persons enslaved – alongside more present traumas around migrations, displacement, illness, and loss.”

Read Handle with Care (II)

©Valda Jackson MBE RWA