Olive Senior - Paperback

by Denise Decaires Narain (Author)

This book offers the first sustained and comprehensive discussion of the Jamaican writer, Olive Senior's extensive oeuvre, including poetry, short stories and socio-cultural writings published from the late 1970s onwards. Now resident in Toronto, Senior's work remains intensely focused on Jamaica: its landscape, language, people and cultures. Her work offers portraits of 'ordinary' Jamaicans negotiating the harsh postcolonial realities of life within Jamaica as well as those who migrate in search of work. The book discuss Senior's scrutiny of the way power operates at global and local levels alerting the reader to the bigger historical narratives that position (but don't quite 'fix') the individuals she writes about. The detailed inventory of Jamaican life in the short stories and poetry is consolidated in Senior's cultural archival work. Deploying a poetics of wry understatement, Senior's oeuvre insinuates rather than declaims its truths and makes a distinct and invaluable intervention in Caribbean Literature.

Author Biography

Denise de Caires Narain is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sussex and also taught at the University of the West Indies. She was born in Guyana and was Chair of the Guyana Prize in 2002. She has published widely on Caribbean women's writing including Contemporary Caribbean Women's Poetry: Making Style (2001).