Olive Senior (Writers and Their Work)

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.