Lorna Goodison

Lorna Goodison (born August 1, 1947 in Kingston ) is a Jamaican writer.

Life

Lorna Goodison attended the Anglican High School in Kingston and began studying art at the Jamaica School of Art, which she continued at the Art Students League of New York .

She first worked as an art teacher in Jamaica and earned her living in the advertising industry. She has been a freelance writer ever since. As a poet Goodison held various teaching positions, so at the University of Toronto and the University of Michigan .

Her artistic work has been exhibited on various occasions. Her paintings are usually used for the covers of her books.

For her second volume of poetry, I Am Becoming My Mother , she received the Commonwealth Writers' Prize of the Americas in 1986 and became known with it. The poetry book Oracabessa received the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in 2014 in the poetry category.

It was included in the anthology Daughters of Africa , edited in 1992 by Margaret Busby in London and New York.

Goodison was invited to various literary festivals and read at Interlit in Germany in 1988 and 1993. In 2013 she was awarded the Jamaican Order of Distinction (Knight). In 2017 she was poet laureate of Jamaica, in 2019 she was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry for her oeuvre and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020 .

Works (selection)

• Tamarind Season . Institute of Jamaica, 1980
• I am becoming my mother . New Beacon Books, 1986, ISBN 978-0901241689
• Heartease . New Beacon Books, 1988, ISBN 978-0901241870
• Poems . 1989
• Baby Mother and the King of Swords . Short stories. Longman, 1990, ISBN 978-0582054929
  • The Sword King: Short Stories from Jamaica . Translation and epilogue Wolfgang Binder. Frankfurt am Main: dipa-Verlag, 1992 ISBN 978-3-7638-0171-8
• Selected Poems . University of Michigan Press, 1992 ISBN 978-0472064939
• Virgin Brown: Poems . Translation and epilogue Wolfgang Binder. Wuppertal: Hammer, 1994 ISBN 978-3-87294-624-9
• To Us, All Flowers Are Roses . University of Illinois Press, 1995, ISBN 978-0252064593
• Turn thanks . University of Illinois Press, 1999, ISBN 978-9766371951
• Guinea Woman . Carcanet, 2000, ISBN 978-1857544862
• Traveling Mercies . McClelland & Stewart, 2001, ISBN 978-0771033827
• Controlling the Silver . University of Illinois Press, 2005, ISBN 978-0252072123
• Fool-Fool Rose Is Leaving Labor-in-Vain Savannah . Short stories. Ian Randle, 2005, ISBN 978-9766371951
• Goldengrove . Carcanet, 2006, ISBN 978-1857548488
• From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island . Atlantic Books, 2009, ISBN 978-1843549956
• By Love Possessed . Short stories. Amistad Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0062127358
• Oracabessa . Carcanet, 2013, ISBN 978-1847772428

literature

• Anne Walmsley: A Far Reaching Voice , in: EA Markham (Ed.): Hinterland: Caribbean poetry from the West Indies & Britain . Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1989, ISBN 1-85224-087-3 , pp. 229-247
• Denise de Caires Narain: Contemporary Caribbean women's poetry: making style . London: Routledge, 2002, ISBN 0-415-21812-8 , pp. 156-168
• Denise de Caires Narain: Interview with Lorna Goodison . In: Susheila Nasta (Ed.): Writing across worlds: contemporary writers talk . London: Routledge, 2004, ISBN 978-0-415-34566-8 , pp. 45-58
• Peter Childs, Jean Jacques Weber, Patrick Williams: Post-colonial theory and literatures: African, Caribbean and South Asian . Trier: WVT, 2006, ISBN 3-88476-750-X , pp. 169-178
• Jahan Ramazani: Poetry and Decolonization . Nigel Alderman (Ed.): A concise companion to postwar British and Irish poetry . Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, ISBN 1-4051-2924-7 , pp. 111-131
• Michael A. Bucknor et al. a. (Ed.): The Routledge companion to anglophone Caribbean literature . London: Routledge, 2011, ISBN 978-0-415-48577-7 , pp. 199-208; Pp. 603-606

Web links

• Literature by and about Lorna Goodison in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Lorna Goodison in the WorldCat bibliographic database
• Kara Olson, Jason Hubbard, Ayme Almendarez: Lorna Goodison , at University of Minnesota, 2005

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Wolfgang Binder: Half the night weighs heavier than its silence. ": Mixed writings: reviews and afterwords on literature from the USA, Latin America and the Caribbean . Foreword Holger Jergius. Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 1998 ISBN 978-3-8260 -1446-8 , p. 261ff.