Sylvia Wynter Biography

Caribbean novelist and playwright, born of Jamaican parents in the Holguin Oriente Province of Cuba, educated at King's College, University of London, gaining her MA in 1953 for a thesis on Spanish drama. After a period in London writing plays for radio, she became a lecturer at the University of the West Indies and later taught at the universities of Michigan and California. In 1977 she became Professor of African and Afro-American Studies at Stanford University. Her highly regarded novel The Hills of Hebron (1962) forms a disquieting treatment of the crisis in a West Indian community produced by tensions between Christian revivalism and the persistence of the older African modes of spirituality. Wynter is among the most noted contemporary women playwrights of the Caribbean, rooting much of her work in the folk idioms of the region; her plays, which remain largely unpublished, include Shh…It's a Wedding (produced 1961), 1865, Ballad of a Rebellion (produced 1965), and Maskarade (produced 1979).