Marina Salandy-Brown

Marina Salandy-Brown FRSA is a Trinidadian journalist, broadcaster and cultural activist. She was formerly an editor and Senior Manager in Radio and News and Current Affairs programmes with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in London, one of the BBC's few top executives from an ethnic minority background. She is the founder and director of the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, held annually in Trinidad and Tobago, "the biggest literary festival in the Anglophone Caribbean", and of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She is also co-founder of the Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize.

She was born Marina Salandy in Diego Martin, Trinidad - she has said, "all Salandys apparently started there, but I come from everywhere in Trinidad. Although I was a town girl, my father ran government experimental (agricultural) stations and we were lucky enough to also live all over rural Trinidad. I lived in Maracas, St Joseph, when you had to go down into the river five times before getting to our house at the end of the road. When we lived in Matelot, the road wasn’t properly paved." She attended the government secondary school in Diego Martin.

At the age of 17 Salandy-Brown left Trinidad and migrated to Britain to attend university. In London, she began her working life in publishing as an editor with the Melrose Press, after which she was for more than 20 years an editor and senior manager in BBC Radio and News and Current Affairs programmes, until her return to Trinidad in 2004.

Among the BBC radio programmes she produced was BBC Radio 4's Start the Week, presented by Melvyn Bragg, who has recalled the beginning of their successful long-term collaboration: "I met this producer Marina Salandy-Brown and neither she nor I wanted to go on doing the same Start the Week. I remember we had lunch together – and I said, 'Well, if I'm going to go on I want to do this sort of stuff,’ And she said, 'So do I' – or she said it first and I agreed…. And then we just conscientiously, steadily put that into operation and changed the programme." In their new styling of the programme, "The producer, Marina Salandy-Brown, and I introduced scientists, historians and philosophers on to that Monday morning slot, and changed the nature of the programme. A change which I am glad that my successor Jeremy Paxman and his successor Andrew Marr have kept."

...
Wikipedia