Meralda Warren
Poet, Artist and Cultural Custodian of Pitkern · 1959
Who is Meralda Warren?
Meralda Warren was born on 28 June 1959 on Pitcairn Island, a descendant of the Bounty mutineers, and has held many roles across the island's tiny community, including nurse, police and immigration officer, elected Island Council member, and president of the Lands Commission. She is a practitioner of traditional Pitcairn tapa-cloth art and has kept bees on the island since 1978. Warren compiled and co-authored "A Taste of Pitcairn," the island's first cookbook, first published in 1986, and co-produced "Mi Bas Side Orn Pitcairn" ("My Favourite Place on Pitcairn") with the island's schoolchildren, the first book written and published in both English and Pitkern. She has worked extensively to document and preserve Pitkern, the English-Tahitian creole spoken on Pitcairn, compiling vocabulary lists and giving public recitations, including her own Pitkern translation of Laurence Binyon's remembrance poem "For the Fallen." In 2011 she became the first Pitcairn Islander to receive a Commonwealth Connections International arts residency. Warren has also spoken candidly in press interviews about the difficult period surrounding Pitcairn's 2004 sexual-abuse trial, which fractured trust within the small community, offering a rare honest public reflection on hardship within island life.
Sources: Wikipedia, "Meralda Warren" · Kathy Marks, Lost Paradise: From Mutiny on the Bounty to a Modern-Day Legacy of Sexual Mayhem (2009) · Pacific Union College, Pitcairn Islands Study Center