Rebecca Calderon (nee Browne) (1969–) was born in Leigh Park. Her large paternal family is Anglo-Indian and arrived in Portsmouth in the late 1950s. Her mother hails from Kent and met her father in 1967 while on a seaside holiday in Southsea. Rebecca moved to Emsworth when she was six and attended schools there and in Havant, then went on to study Theatre Studies & Music at Southdowns College.
Her first play Kitchen Sink Drama was shortlisted for the British Young Persons Radio Play Award in 1990. Disillusioned with UK politics and the newly introduced tuition fees, Rebecca left England the day before Christmas in 1990 along with her two childhood friends, and the three girls embarked on a road trip across Europe. Their journey took them through Gibraltar where Rebecca met and married Klaus Faller. They started a family and she made Gibraltar her permanent home. Rebecca became involved in local politics in Gibraltar and in turn was involved with Liberal youth movements in Europe.
Her interest in social and political history led her to write her first full length play The Civil Garrison (2004). The play was never staged but parts were adapted into a new play Llévame Donde Nací, produced in 2016. In the same year Rebecca published her first novel Renault 5 based on the diaries written by the author and her two journeywomen during their 1990 road trip. In 2021 she published Ten Thousand Words a book of ten short stories each exactly one thousand words. Rebecca has won the Gibraltar Poetry Prize and the Short Story Prize, and was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize for poetry in 2015.
Rebecca married her second husband John Calderon in 2020 and she lives in Gibraltar with her four children. She is currently writing her second novel Pompey & Circumstance which is an homage to Portsmouth, its people, and its environs.
If you have any comments, queries, or suggestions about any of the map entries, please contact the Map Director, Mark Frost: mark.frost@port.ac.uk