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Phyllis Shand Allfrey

May 30, 2019

Phyllis Shand Allfrey was born in the island of Dominica in 1908. During her stay in England in the decades of 1930 and 1940, she was a member of the Fabian Society and of the British Labour Party. After her return to Dominica in 1954 she founded the Dominican Labour Party. She was a Minister of Labor and Social Affairs for the ephemeral West Indies Federation (1958-1962) and an editor of The Herald until 1965, when she founded her own newspaper, The Star, an opposition newspaper that cultivated the work of local writers. She is mainly known as the author of The Orchid House, a novel published in 1953. Her short stories were collected in It Falls into Place: The Short Stories of Phyllis Shand Allfrey (2004). She passed away in Roseau, the capital of her island of birth, in 1986.