5 CARIBBEAN CANADIAN AUTHORS TO KNOW February 25, 2021 – Posted in: Highlights – Tags: Black History Month, Fiction, Poetry
Olive Senior is the Toronto-based Jamaican author of 18 works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and children’s literature.
Her widely taught, widely translated works have won her many awards, including the Matt Cohen Award, the Musgrave Medal, and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.
Her stories, set in rural and urban Jamaica, are celebrated for their humour and musicality, haunting use of history and folklore, and rich characters, many of them children coming to terms with a hostile world.
WHAT TO READ:
Sam Selvon was born in Trinidad and went on to become one of the Caribbean’s most renowned writers.
Read around the world for his modern classics, he is recognized as a pioneer for using creole to extend the possibilities of the English novel.
Whether satirizing the British empire or detailing the inner lives of Caribbean immigrants, his works showcase an enormous range and are in turns hilarious, lyrical, sensuous, and philosophical.
WHAT TO READ:
H. Nigel Thomas was born in St. Vincent and the Grenadines and lives in Quebec.
His oeuvre includes several fictions about the immigrant experience that feature a large and kaleidoscopic cast of characters living in the contemporary Caribbean and Canada.
He is known as a keen observer of social reality who writes in a sharp style marked by the use of patois.
WHAT TO READ:
Pamela Mordecai is an award-winning Jamaican writer of poetry, fiction, plays, literary criticism, and children’s books.
The winner of a Musgrave Medal and a Centenary Medal, she is widely lauded for her contributions to the national literature, and her writing frequently appears in major anthologies of Caribbean writing.
Her writing delights in playful subversions of the Western canon and in the ordinary beauty of everyday Caribbean speech.
WHAT TO READ:
Sasenarine Persaud is a Guyanese writer who lived in Toronto for many years.
Having grown up in a largely Indian Guyana, his literary aesthetic of “Yogic Realism” is deeply inspired by Hindu philosophy, mythology, and ritual.
He is a compelling voice of the diaspora who brings together scenes, images, and styles from an imagined India, his childhood Caribbean, and present-day Canada.
WHAT TO READ:
