Shakirah Bourne is a Barbadian author, filmmaker and lover of mangoes. She has written four feature films: PAYDAY (writer/producer), Two Smart (writer/co-director), Next PAYDAY (writer/producer) and A Caribbean Dream (writer/director). A Caribbean Dream is distributed by Verve Pictures and was nominated for three National Film Awards UK. Her stories have been featured in several literary journals, and she was a finalist for the 2018 CODE Burt Award forCaribbean YA Literature and the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her debut middle grade novel, JOSEPHINE AGAINST THE SEA, will be published by Scholastic in 2021.