Joan Anita Barbara Armatrading, MBE (born 9 December 1950) is a British singer-songwriter and guitarist. 　　A three-time Grammy Award-nominee, Armatrading has also been nominated twice for BRIT Awards as Best Female Artist. She also received an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contemporary Song Collection in 1996. 　　In a recording career spanning 40 years, Armatrading has released 18 studio albums, as well as several live albums and compilations. 　　Joan Armatrading was born in 1950 in Basseterre on the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts, the third of six children. Her father was a carpenter and her mother was a housewife. When she was three years old, her parents moved with their two eldest boys to Birmingham, England, while Joan was sent to live with her grandmother on the Caribbean island of Antigua. In early 1958 at the age of seven, she joined her parents in Brookfields, then a district of Birmingham. The area is now mostly demolished and has been absorbed into the district of Hockley. Her father had played in a band in his youth, later forbidding his children from touching his guitar. At about the age of 14, Armatrading began writing songs by setting her own limericks to music on a piano that her mother had purchased as "a piece of furniture". Shortly thereafter, her mother bought her a £3 guitar (equivalent to £53 in 2016) from a pawn shop in exchange for two prams, and the younger Armatrading began teaching herself the instrument. 　　Armatrading left school at the age of 15 to support her family, and her first job was at Rabone Chesterman, an engineering tool manufacturer in Hockley, Birmingham. She lost the job after taking her guitar to work and playing it during tea-breaks.