Evan Jones
Biography
Evan Gordon Newton Jones (29 December 1927 – 18 April 2023) was a Jamaican writer and poet, long based in the United Kingdom. Regarded as one of Jamaica's most accomplished writers, Jones had a career that spanned over 50 years. His body of work includes poems, plays, novels, anthologies of Jamaican folklore and motion-picture screenplays. His best-known scripts include The Damned (1962), King and Country (1964), Funeral in Berlin (1966), Two Gentlemen Sharing (1969), Wake in Fright (1971), Escape to Victory (1981) and Champions (1983) and his writing for theatre and television included work for the BBC, ITV and PBS. Jones was born in Hector's River, Portland Parish, Jamaica, and was educated at Munro College, Haverford College and Wadham College, Oxford. After graduating from Haverford, he undertook relief work in Gaza with the American Friends Service Committee. At Oxford, he wrote "The Song of the Banana Man", a poem which combined Jamaican Patois with English metrical verse and became widely taught in the Caribbean and anthologised internationally. Jones's professional career began in British television with The Widows of Jaffa and In a Backward Country, both produced by the BBC in the 1950s. In the 1960s he began a major collaboration with Joseph Losey, writing more of Losey's films than any other single screenwriter. He also wrote The Madhouse on Castle Street, a now-lost BBC television play featuring the acting debut of Bob Dylan, and later collaborated with Ted Kotcheff on Two Gentlemen Sharing and Wake in Fright, the latter of which came to be regarded as a landmark of the Australian New Wave. In the 1970s Jones wrote the BBC/PBS documentary drama series The Fight Against Slavery, which he considered his major work and which won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize in 1976. He later wrote the novels Stone Haven (1993), regarded as a classic of modern West Indian literature, and Alonso and the Drug Baron (2006). Jones was also a founder member of the Carib
Bio from Wikipedia
Credited work
16 releases · 4 albums · active 1981–2020
- Performance · 8
- Other credits · 7
- Engineering · 2
- Mastering · 1
Studios: Rhythmicru Studio Toronto · Shack Studio
Frequent collaborators
- Bamses Venner
- Sugar Virus
- Hock (2)