Olive Senior

Olive Marjorie Senior (born December 23, 1943 in Trelawny Parish , Jamaica ) is a Jamaican writer.

Life

Senior was born the seventh of ten children in Trelawny Parish. After attending Montego Bay High School for Girls , she began working as a journalist for the Jamaica Gleaner newspaper in Kingston at 19, and later worked for the Jamaica Information Service . A scholarship later enabled her to study journalism in Cardiff and Ottawa . During her studies, she began writing poetry and short stories. Back in Jamaica, she initially worked as a freelance speechwriter and in PR, before editing the journal Social and Economic Studies at the University of the West Indies from 1972 to 1977 . In 1982 she became a member of the Institute of Jamaica and editor of the Jamaica Journal . In 1989, after Hurricane Gilbert , she left Jamaica, first lived in Europe (Portugal, the Netherlands and Great Britain) and then settled in Toronto in 1993 . She gives lectures and leads writing workshops at universities in various countries.

plant

In addition to a novel, two children's books and a radio play produced by the CBC , Senior mainly published poetry and short stories. Her poems have been included in numerous anthologies .

In her stories she addresses the creolization process and the resulting culture, the search for the personal and cultural identity of the Caribbean inhabitants as well as class, race and gender conflicts. As an expression of these conflicts, she also sees the contrast between standard English and the vernacular, the Jamaican patois . Some of the stories are set in the rural milieu of the 1940s and 1950s that Senior knows from childhood.

She also wrote non-fiction books, for example a study on the lives of black Jamaicans. Olive Senior's works have been translated into German, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese and Russian.

Works

Poetry

• Talking of Trees , Calabash, 1986.
• Gardening in the Tropics , McClelland & Stewart, 1994.
• Over the Roofs of the World , Insomniac Press, 2005
• Shell , Insomniac Press, 2007

Short prose

• Summer Lightning and Other Stories , Longman, 1986. ISBN 9780582786271
• Arrival of the Snake-Woman , Longman, 1989. ISBN 978-0582031708
• Discerner of Hearts , McClelland & Stewart, 1995. ISBN 978-0771080548
• The Pain Tree , Cormorant, 2015. ISBN 9781770864344

novel

• Dancing Lessons , Cormorant Books, 2011. ISBN 9781770860476

Children's books

• Birthday Suit , Annick Press, 2012
• Anna Carries Water , Tradewind, 2013

Non-fiction

• The Message Is Change: A Perspective on the 1972 General Elections , Kingston Publishers, 1972.
• Pop Story Gi Mi (four booklets on Jamaican heritage for schools), Ministry of Education (Kingston, Jamaica), 1973.
• AZ of Jamaican Heritage , Heinemann and Gleaner Company Ltd, 1984.
• Working Miracles: Women's Lives in the English-Speaking Caribbean , Indiana University Press, 1991.
• Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage , Twin Guinep, 2004. (expanded new edition of AZ of Jamaican Heritage )
• Dying To Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal , University of the West Indies Press, 2014. ISBN 9789766404574

Prices (selection)

• 1987: Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Summer Lightning and Other Stories
• 1988: Silver Musgrave Medal
• 1994–95: Dana Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing and International Education at St. Lawrence University in Canton (New York)
• 1995: Francesco Giuseppe Bressani Literary Prize for Gardening in the Tropics
• 2003: Norman Washington Manley Foundation Award for Excellence (for the preservation of Jamaica's cultural heritage)
• 2004: Golden Musgrave Medal
• 2011: Isabel Sisson's Canadian Children's Story Award
• 2015: OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, winner in the Non-Fiction category for Dying To Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal
• 2016: OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, winner in the Fiction category and overall winner for The Pain Tree
• 2019: Matt Cohen Prize (for life's work)

literature

• Anne Collett: “Why Don't You Write about Canada?” Olive Senior's Poetry, Everybody's History, and the “Condition of Resonance”, in Beyond “Understanding Canada”. Transnational Perspectives on Canadian Literature. Ed. Melissa Tanti, Jeremy Haynes, Daniel Coleman, Lorraine York. University of Alberta Press, Edmonton 2017, pp. 79-98

Web links

• Website of the author (there is also a detailed bibliography)

source

• Jana Gohrisch: Senior, Olive . In: Authors Lexicon. Ed. V. Ute Hechtfischer, Renate Hof, Inge Stephan and Flora Veit-Wild. Frankfurt / M. Suhrkamp 2002, p. 488f. ISBN 3518399187