John Edgar Colwell Hearne

John Edgar Colwell Hearne (born February 4, 1926 in Montreal , Canada , † December 12, 1994 in Stony Hill , Jamaica ) was a writer , journalist and teacher .

life and work

John Hearne was born to Jamaican parents in Montréal, Canada. He came to Jamaica when he was two. where he attended Jamaica College in Kingston . After serving in the British Royal Air Force during World War II, he studied English and philosophy at the University of Edinburgh .

He taught as a teacher at the University of London and from 1950 to 1952 at a school in Jamaica. During that time he also worked as a journalist. He then toured Europe for a few years (at times together with the writer Roger Mais ), but returned to Jamaica in 1957. He was also an employee of the University of the West Indies in Mona .

His first publication in 1955 was the novel Voices under the Window (German: Voices under the window , 1956). Set in Jamaica in the late 1940s or early 1950s, it tells in a riot how a man who grew up in a privileged environment decides to stand up as a politician for the underprivileged. His other novels and short stories, which he published from 1956 to 1961, are set on the imaginary island of Cayuna, which is very reminiscent of Jamaica. There he deals with topics with current and local relevance, such as the development of the bauxite industry , the Cuban revolution or the beginning of the Rastafarian movement.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he and journalist Morris Cargill wrote a series of three thrillers under the pseudonym "John Morris", which are set in the intelligence community.

In 1985 his last short story, The Sure Salvation , was published, which is set on a slave ship in the mid-19th century.

Works

• Voices under the Window , London 1955; Voices under the window , Munich 1956, translated by Reinhard Baumgart
• Stranger at the Gate , London 1956; Der Andere , Munich 1957, translated from English by Hans Egon Gerlach
• The Eye of the Storm , Boston 1958
• The Faces of Love , London 1959; Faces of love , Munich 1959
• Autumn Equinox , London 1959
• Land of the Living , London 1961
• The Sure Salvation , New York 1982; Paradise in front of you. Slavery and rebellion on the "Sure Salvation" , Zurich 2006

Under the pseudonym John Morris (together with Morris Cargill)

• Fever Grass , Kingston 1969; Trip with hash , 1971, translated from English by Heinz Kausträter (Shocker Volume 94)
• The Candywine Development , Kingston 1970; Deadly Sting , 1970 (1971: Shocker Volume 105)
• The Checkerboard Caper , New Jersey 1971

Individual evidence

1. ^ "Hearne, John Edgar Colwell," Michael Hughes, A Companion to West Indian Literature , Collins, 1979, pp. 53-54.
2. ↑ “Hearne, John Edgar Colwell”, Fatim Boutros, Revision as Illusion ?: The coming to terms with slavery in recent novels of the Anglophone Caribbean (Studies on the “New World”; Vol. 10), Würzburg, 2004

• Shivaun Allison Hearne; John Hearne's life and fiction: a critical biographical study; Thesis (M. Phil.) - University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, 2000.

Web links

• Cover pictures of the English-language original editions ttculture.org