Late Windrush victim’s compensation to fund prize for British Caribbean playwrights

The first prize dedicated to discovering and developing British Caribbean playwrights has been launched using compensation awarded to a Windrush victim who died before receiving it.

The Windrush Prize for British Caribbean Playwrights, believed to be the first major prize of its kind in 30 years, has been established by Shereener Browne, the founder and artistic director of Orísun Productions and a former barrister, in memory of her late father, Myron Brown.

The prize will award £10,000 to a UK-based British Caribbean playwright over the age of 18.

The winning play will receive a minimum three-week run at the Arcola theatre in 2027, co-produced by Arcola and Orísun Productions, and will be published by Methuen Drama.

The prize is open to represented and unrepresented playwrights, with submissions required to be unpublished, full-length plays.

The launch of the prize is one of a number of events taking place across the UK to mark Windrush Day, which commemorates the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks in Essex in June 1948, bringing passengers from the Caribbean who helped rebuild postwar Britain.

Browne’s father came to Britain from St Kitts and Nevis in the 1960s, and spent decades living and working in the UK before being told he was no longer a British citizen when he tried to renew his passport.

He was one of thousands of mainly Black Britons who were wrongly classed as illegal migrants and stripped of citizenship rights over decades. Browne said the experience had a devastating impact on her father’s sense of self.

“I didn’t understand until my father came to live with me how deeply British he felt,” she said. “He felt completely rejected when he couldn’t get his passport back.”

She added that the stripping of his British identity left him questioning who he was. “His very identity was taken away from him in one fell swoop, without consultation and seemingly overnight. It knocked his confidence and his mental health.”

Browne applied to the Windrush Compensation Scheme on her father’s behalf after he developed dementia and suffered strokes. She said her father died before the money was paid, despite her asking officials to expedite the claim because he had little time left.

After he died, she was instructed to go through probate in order to access the compensation.

“I explained to them that it felt like pulling the scab off a wound. When I should be getting on with the job of grieving the loss of my father, I was having to jump through hoops, go through red tape, when it wasn’t necessary,” she said. “I said to them, in tears: ‘Do you realise you are retraumatising me?’”

Government figures indicate more than 50 people died while awaiting payouts after submitting a claim. Earlier this month, about 70 public figures signed an open letter backing a call by the Windrush Justice Community Collective for a radical overhaul of the scheme.

“I felt very strongly that I wanted something positive to come out of it,” Browne said. “The genesis of the prize is tightly bound up with the loss of my dad and with the fact that this generation is dying out. And I do not want history to erase their impact on British life.”

Browne said the prize was designed to address the underrepresentation of British Caribbean voices in British theatre and to create a lasting pathway for writers whose stories have often been overlooked.

“What we don’t teach our children is how the Caribbean is so tightly wound up with Britain,” she said. “You almost can’t have one without the other.”

New research from British Future’s Voices of Equity project found that only 41% of ethnic minority young people aged 18 to 24 are aware of the Windrush story. Awareness was even lower among white people in the same age group, with just 31% saying they knew about Windrush.

Browne added it was not just the wealth drawn from those islands. “There are so many individuals who came to this country and had an impact on politics, not just the politics in the UK, but global politics,” she said.

As part of the wider initiative, Orísun Productions will run workshops, seminars and networking events with partner organisations to support emerging writers. Browne said the programme would seek out people who may write, journal or have stories to tell but do not yet see themselves as playwrights.

“There isn’t just one British Caribbean experience,” she said. “We see so few of those stories on stage and screen and, when we do, they’re often very narrow.”

Elsewhere, a permanent Windrush-inspired heritage trail was launched in the London borough of Hammersmith to celebrate the borough’s African-Caribbean history and contribution to British culture.

Local primary school pupils and residents took part in the inaugural walk through Shepherd’s Bush, which features sites including the Bush theatre, a launching pad for Black British playwrights, and the original home of Greensleeves Records, one of the world’s longest-running reggae labels.