Background
Sylvia Wynter was born on May 11, 1928 in Holguin Oriente Province, Cuba, in the family of Percival and Lola Maude (Reed) Wynter. At the age of two she returned to her home country, Jamaica, with her parents (both born there).
critic dramatist essayist novelist philosopher
Sylvia Wynter was born on May 11, 1928 in Holguin Oriente Province, Cuba, in the family of Percival and Lola Maude (Reed) Wynter. At the age of two she returned to her home country, Jamaica, with her parents (both born there).
Sylvia was educated at the St. Andrew High School for Girls. In 1946, she was awarded the Jamaica Centenary Scholarship for Girls, which took her to King's College London, to read for the Bachelor of Arts honours in Spanish from 1947 to 1949. She was awarded the Master of Arts in December 1953 for her thesis.
In 1958, Sylvia completed "Under the Sun", a full-length stage play, which was bought by the Royal Court Theatre in London. In 1962, Wynter published her only novel, "The Hills of Hebron."
Wynter returned to academia, and in 1963, was appointed assistant lecturer in Hispanic literature at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies. She remained there until 1974.
In 1974, Wynter was invited by the Department of Literature at the University of California at San Diego to be a professor of Comparative and Spanish Literature and to lead a new program in Third World literature. She left UCSD in 1977 to become chairperson of African and Afro-American Studies, and professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University. She is now Professor Emerita at Stanford University.
In the mid- to late-1960s, Wynter began writing critical essays addressing her interests in Caribbean, Latin American, and Spanish history and literatures. In 1968 and 1969 she published a two-part essay proposing to transform scholars' very approach to literary criticism.
In 1955 Sylvia was married to a Norwegian pilot with the surname Isachsen for the first time, but divorced. In 1956, Wynter met the Guyanese novelist Jan Carew, who became her second husband, but their marriage ended in 1971. She is the mother of two children, Annemarie and Christopher.