June Aming remembers Saturday mornings at the corner shop with her mother and sisters. Each child could choose a chocolate bar and a book. Her sisters usually picked titles like Judy for Girls. Aming went straight for Noddy. Soon she was filling copybooks with stories of her own, performing them for her childhood friend Charmaine at mock “book launches.”
“I wrote because I loved creating characters that I wanted to be,” she says, “and settings where I wanted to live.”
In 2015, her story Carnival Baby was shortlisted for the Small Axe Literary Competition. She later won first prize in the 2023 BlackInk Writing Competition. In 2024, she was selected for the Bocas Lit Fest Breakthrough Fellowship and was longlisted for the BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. In 2025, she was named a finalist for the Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award.
Aming holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, and her writing appears in multiple anthologies, including Moving Right Along and The Caribbean Writer Vol. 26. Her debut novel, Yellow Is Not For Girls Like Me, went to auction and has been acquired by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, an imprint of Hachette UK, scheduled for publication in June 2027. During her MFA at UWI St Augustine, under the guidance of lecturers including Dr Muli Amaye, Aming began to think more closely about character, emotional truth and the demands of narrative.
“I discovered that writing is not a selfish task undertaken by those who just want to see their own thoughts on paper, but that writing carried the responsibility of creating authentic characters that were fully functional and lived lives that resonated with its audience,” she says.
Aming describes her writing as shaped by an awareness of the ways people harm each other through race, religion, class, gender and personal relationships. “I write now aware of the injustices in the world; the pain we cause each other in the name of religion, race, hate and even in the name of love,” she says. “I write to tell the stories of those who are silenced and need to be heard. I write to heal my hurts, with the hope that what I say can perhaps be a balm to someone else’s wound. I write to bring a little laughter and cheer into an ordinary situation, on an ordinary day. There are so many reasons I write, but the most important reason is that it is what I feel called to do. My blood is my ink, my fingers the pen and without any of this, I think I would just feel empty. So, I will continue to write for an audience of one, or many.”
The following is an extract from Carnival Baby, by June Aming, shortlisted for the Small Axe Literary Competition in 2015.
