Collection: June Henfrey

June Henfrey was born June Gollop, part of a large extended family. She grew up in St David's Village, Barbados, in the heart of sugarcane country in 1939. She won an island scholarship in 1957, which took her to Oxford, UK, where she read French, gained a first class degree and then did research on the Martinquan poet and politician, Aime Cesaire. In Oxford she married Colin Henfrey, anthropologist and photographer, with whom she travelled and worked in the United States and Brazil, before settling in Liverpool in the north west of the UK. There she raised three sons and worked in a number of community projects before returning to work as a lecturer in social studies at Liverpool University. She was particularly involved in the Liverpool Women's Technology Scheme and its centre, Blackburne House, whose library is named in her memory. In 1991 she learnt that she had cancer and began writing the stories which were posthumously published as Coming Home and Other Stories by Peepal Tree in 1994. The stories are set in Barbados, to which she returned frequently in her later life, and are concerned with the lives of women and their struggle to change their lives and their island's history from slavery onwards. June Henfrey died in 1992.