Olive Senior Biography

Jamaican writer, born in the rural Trelawney district of Jamaica, educated at Montego Bay High School and at Carleton University, Ottawa. After working as a publications officer at the University of the West Indies, she became the managing director of the Institute of Jamaica Publications and editor of the Jamaica Journal. Her early works include The Message Is Change (1972), a survey of the 1972 Jamaican General Election. Summer Lightning (1986) and The Arrival of the Snake Woman (1989), her collections of short stories, draw on the oral traditions of her rural background for their moving and sometimes disarmingly humorous evocations of conditions among the working-class inhabitants of Jamaica. Her poetry, collected in Talking of Trees (1985), conveys her imaginative sense of the interactions of the past and present in the island's communities. Among her other publications is Working Miracles (1991), a sociological survey of women in the Caribbean.