Biography
Olive Senior is an award-winning Jamaican poet, novelist, short story and non-fiction writer based in Toronto. She spent her formative years in Trelawny Parish, Jamaica, in a rural farming family, the seventh of ten children. This landscape and its storytelling traditions are embedded in her work. Senior has written 18 books that often engage with questions of Caribbean identity, including gender and ethnicity. Her many awards include the Writers Trust Matt Cohen Award for Lifetime Achievement, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Her latest work, Pandemic Poems, came into being when Senior began posting poems on social media, to bear witness to strange historical times, and forge connections with readers. Her poetry and stories are included on high school and university syllabi internationally, and have been translated into several languages, including Dutch, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish.