Jamaica Kincaid

Writer from Caribbean now living in the United States, she grew up in Antigua and Dominica, which were then British colonies. Translated into more than twenty languages and, on several occasions, a front runner for the Nobel Prize for Literature, she is considered to be one of the most influential writers of present-day literature in the US. When she was seventeen her family sent her to the US to work as an au pair for a well-off family. It was then that she enrolled in evening classes at a community college to study photography. Eventually she began to write for The New Yorker, where she was a staff writer for more than twenty years, and it was here that one of her most famous stories, Girl was published in 1978, after which it was studied in writing schools around the world for decades. Notable among her literary works are A Small Place, 1988 (published in Spanish as Un lugar pequeño, 2021, Pre-Textos), Lucy, 1990 (in Catalan as Lucy, 2018, Les Hores/2009, Txalaparta), The Autobiography of My Mother, 1996 (in Catalan, Autobiografia de la meva mare, 2019, Les Hores/2022, Lumen), My Brother, 1997 (in Catalan, El meu germà, 2022, Les Hores/Lumen), and See Now Then, 2013 (in Spanish, Ahora y entonces, 2022, Lumen). All of these books with notable autobiographical elements. She has received many awards in her writing career, including the 2000 Prix Femina Étranger 2000, the 2014 American Book Award, and the 2017 Dan David Prize, in recognition of a rebellious, empowering oeuvre dealing with questions like the relationship between memory and identity, the colonial legacy, and family relations. Since 1992 she has been a member of the department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, where she teaches Creative Writing.