Background
Olive Senior was born on December 23, 1941, in Trelawny, Cockpit Country, Jamaica. The daughter of a small farmer and a stay-at-home mother, she was the seventh of ten children.
Senior later won a scholarship to study journalism at the Thomson Foundation in Cardiff, Wales, and as a Commonwealth scholar attended Carleton University School of Journalism in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada from 1963 to 1967. In 1967 she earned her Bachelor of Science from that university.
Senior later won a scholarship to study journalism at the Thomson Foundation in Cardiff, Wales, and as a Commonwealth scholar attended Carleton University School of Journalism in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada from 1963 to 1967. In 1967 she earned her Bachelor of Science from that university.
Olive Senior is on the left.
(The nine vividly rendered stories of place and character ...)
The nine vividly rendered stories of place and character in "Discerner of Hearts" are set in Jamaica, both rural and urban, some present-day, others looking back several decades. Senior’s gift for fine characterization, for recreating the music of everyday speech, pervades these tales, which explore notions of home and exile as well as the intricate realm of the human spirit - its fallible nature, its indomitable strength against the sometimes downward pull of fate.
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1995
Olive Senior was born on December 23, 1941, in Trelawny, Cockpit Country, Jamaica. The daughter of a small farmer and a stay-at-home mother, she was the seventh of ten children.
Olive Senior graduated from Montego Bay High School for Girls. Senior later won a scholarship to study journalism at the Thomson Foundation in Cardiff, Wales, and as a Commonwealth scholar attended Carleton University School of Journalism in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada from 1963 to 1967. In 1967 she earned her Bachelor of Science from that university.
Olive Senior started her career as a journalist with the Daily Gleaner and later entered the world of publishing. She was editor of two of the Caribbean's leading journals - "Social and Economic Studies" at the University of the West Indies from 1972 to 1977 and "Jamaica Journal" since 1982, published by Institute of Jamaica Publications of which she was also Managing Director. She left Jamaica in 1989, after Hurricane Gilbert hit Jamaica, and moved to Europe, where she lived in Portugal, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, before settling in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1993.
The Caribbean nevertheless remains the focus of her work, starting with her prizewinning collection of stories "Summer Lightning", followed by "Arrival of the Snake-Woman" and "Discerner of Hearts". Her novel "Dancing Lessons" was published by Cormorant Books in Canada 2011 and "The Pain Tree", a collection of stories, - in the spring of 2015. Her illustrated children's books are "Birthday Suit" and "Anna Carries Water".
Her poetry books are "Shell", "Over the roofs of the world ", "Gardening in the Tropics", and "Talking of Trees". A bilingual English/French edition of her poetry was published by Le Castor Astral in 2014 under the title "Un Pipiri m'a dit"/"A Little Bird Told Me".
Olive Senior's non-fiction works on Caribbean culture include "Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal", the "A-Z of Jamaican Heritage", "Working Miracles: Women's Lives in the English-Speaking Caribbean" and "The Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage".
Her work has been widely taught in schools and universities internationally. "Summer Lightning" has been a literature textbook in Caribbean schools, and "Gardening in the Tropics" has been a poetry textbook for the CAPE syllabus as well the International baccalaureate.
Olive Senior has worked internationally as a creative writing teacher and lecturer on Caribbean literature and culture. She is on the faculty of the Humber School for Writers, Toronto and has taught in the writing programmes at University of Toronto, St Lawrence University, and Barnard College, Columbia University, New York. She has also led writing workshops at the University of Miami, the University of the West Indies, and in the Bahamas, Bermuda, United States, United Kingdom, France, and other places.
Her writing residences have included Ecla Aquitaine Résidences de la Prévôté, Bordeaux, France; University of Adelaide, Australia; University of Alberta and Banff International Writing Studio, Canada; at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica and Trinidad. She has been an Arts Council of England Visiting International Writer, a Hawthornden Fellow in Scotland, and Dana Distinguished International Writer at St Lawrence University.
In addition, Olive Senior's work has been broadcast on both sides of the Atlantic, including the BBC Book at Bedtime and the CBC Festival of Fiction. Her short story "You Think I Mad, Miss?" was produced and performed as "Mad Miss" by Theatre Archipelago in 2005 at Artword Theatre, Toronto. She wrote the radio play 'Window' for the CBC and was internet Poet-in-residence for the Commonwealth Institute in 1999.
Besides, her work is represented in numerous anthologies worldwide and has been translated into several languages, including Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian.
(The nine vividly rendered stories of place and character ...)
1995(In "Shell" Olive Senior continues her ongoing investigati...)
2007Senior's work often addresses questions of Caribbean identity in terms of gender and ethnicity. She has said: "I've had to deal with race because of who I am and how I look. In that process, I've had to determine who I am. I do not think you can be all things to all people. As part of that process, I decided I was a Jamaican. I represent many different races and I'm not rejecting any of them to please anybody. I'm just who I am and you have to accept me or not."
Quotations: "For me, writing, literature, is inextricably fused with magic. Though most of my writing is in a realistic vein, I am conscious at all times of other possibilities lurking just beyond consciousness, of the great ineffable mystery that lies at the core of each life, at the heart of every story."
Olive Senior has been a member of Writers Union of Canada.