|
View an Excerpt (PDF)
Read Reviews
The Toronto author’s Jamaican birthplace
provides the setting for these powerful and poignant stories
that span a period of roughly 150 years, from the closing days
of slavery in 1838 to the 1980s.
The tensions wrought by rapid
change and conflicting loyalties are at the heart of these
stories, most beautifully evoked in the novella “Arrival of the
Snake-Woman”. Here a young boy narrates the seminal event of his
childhood in the late nineteenth century: the coming of a lonely
Indian indentured woman into a mountain village.
Senior’s
stories are leavened with wit and humour and the intricate play
with language and her characters emerge as triumphant examples
of the human spirit unravelling the complex weave of race,
class, and cultural and ethnic identity.
|
|
"Arrival of the
Snake-Woman has consolidated (Olive Senior’s) reputation as one
of the most accomplished writers of short fiction and as one of
the Caribbean’s finest creative minds."
—Caribbean Week
|
Olive Senior is one of Canada's most internationally
recognized and acclaimed writers.
Among her many awards and honours she has won the Commonwealth
Writers Prize and F.G. Bressani Literary Prize, was nominated
for a Governor-General’s Literary Award, and was runner up for
the Casa de Las Americas Prize and the Pat Lowther Award. In
2003, she received the Norman Washington Manley Foundation Award
for Excellence (preservation of cultural heritage – Jamaica).
Her body of published work includes four books of poetry, three
collections of short stories and several award-winning
non-fiction works on Caribbean culture. |
 |
|
|
|
