Blog

Olive Senior

May 30, 2019

Olive Senior was born in 1941 and grew up in a rural zone of Jamaica and in Canada. She has had a distinguished career as a journalist, researcher, writer, editor and as a literature professor. Her poetry and short stories have received numerous prizes: she was awarded the (British) Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1987 for her first short-story collection, Summer Lightning. In 1989, she published a second short-story collection, The Arrival of the Snake Woman, which was followed by Discerner of Hearts in 1995 and The Pain Tree in 2015; the latter title received the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in 2016. Her narrative brilliantly captures the beauty and the anguish of ordinary people’s life in Jamaica. The author has an infallible ability for achieving a dramatic effect, which we see in the surprising endings of many stories. Her most recent work, in the genre of historical essay, is Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal (2014) and a winner of the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Olive Senior is a professor of literature at the Humber School for Writers, Humbert College in Toronto, Canada.