2023-2024
Theme / thème : Air & Fire / L'Air & le Feu
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Portrait Photo Credit: Alex Rice
Olive Senior’s books, articles and lectures span multiple genres, including poetry, fiction, non-fiction and children’s literature. Her twentieth book, Hurricane Watch: New and Collected Poems, was recently published by Carcanet in the UK. It follows Pandemic Poems: First Wave (2021), a work consisting of alphabet poems derived from the language of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her work has found worldwide resonance in numerous critical essays and translations and is taught in educational institutions at various levels. Most recently, Summer Lightning (her first short story collection; 1986) was named one of the 70 outstanding books from the Commonwealth chosen to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee (The Big Jubilee Read).
Her many awards include Canada’s Writers’ Trust Matt Cohen Award for Lifetime Achievement, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, honorary doctorates from the University of the West Indies and York University and the Gold Medal of the Institute of Jamaica.
Olive Senior lives in Toronto but returns frequently to Jamaica and the Caribbean which remain central to her work. She is the Poet Laureate of Jamaica for 2021-2024.
Her many awards include Canada’s Writers’ Trust Matt Cohen Award for Lifetime Achievement, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, honorary doctorates from the University of the West Indies and York University and the Gold Medal of the Institute of Jamaica.
Olive Senior lives in Toronto but returns frequently to Jamaica and the Caribbean which remain central to her work. She is the Poet Laureate of Jamaica for 2021-2024.