The PEN America World Voices Festival presents “The Past and Future of Jamaican Literature,” at the Strand Book Store (Rare Books Room, 828 Broadway, New York, New York) on Wednesday, April 30, 2025, from 6:30 to 7:45pm. Speakers at this event will be Marcia Douglas and Olive Senior. [Many thanks to Anderson Tepper for bringing this item to our attention.]
Description: Jamaican literature is as vibrant and rich as the island’s history. Join award winning Jamaican authors, Olive Senior (Paradise Once) and Marcia Douglas (The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive) for a fireside chat exploring their latest works and the past and future of Jamaican literature. In Paradise Once, former Jamaican Poet Laureate Olive Senior, delves into the aftermath of a fictional massacre of the indigenous Taíno people by colonizing Spanish forces. In Marcia Douglas’ The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive her characters search through history for something or someone lost to the island. In this intimate conversation, these acclaimed authors will discuss how their works fit into the storied canon of Jamaican literature.
Marcia Douglas was born in the U.K., and grew up in Kingston, Jamaica. The author of novels, poems, and essays, she is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Creative Capital, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Whiting Foundation, and a UK Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The Marvellous Equations of the Dread was longlisted for the 2016 Republic of Consciousness Prize and the 2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She is a College Professor of Distinction at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Olive Senior is the award-winning author of twenty books of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children’s literature. She was the Poet Laureate of Jamaica from 2021 to 2024, and has received numerous awards and honors, including honorary doctorates from the University of the West Indies (Jamaica) and York University (Canada), the Gold Medal of the Institute of Jamaica, Canada’s Matt Cohen Award for Lifetime Achievement, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Senior’s work is widely translated and is taught in schools and other institutions worldwide; her writing is also the subject of numerous critical essays. She splits her time between Toronto, Canada and Kingston, Jamaica. Paradise Once is her most recent novel.
For more information, see https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/25-jamaican-literature/
The PEN America World Voices Festival presents “The Past and Future of Jamaican Literature,” at the Strand Book Store (Rare Books Room, 828 Broadway, New York, New York) on Wednesday, April 30, 2025, from 6:30 to 7:45pm. Speakers at this event will be Marcia Douglas and Olive Senior. [Many thanks to Anderson Tepper for bringing this
