Olive Senior – författare

Intended as an introductory sourcebook, Olive Senior provides a background to Caribbean literature, politics and society.This text takes a multidisciplinary approach to the study of women and gender issues in the Caribbean. Olive Senior, using her imaginative skills as a poet, has written a readable books based on a substantial academic examinationof women's lives and work in fourteen countries of the Caribbean. In addition she uses examples from literature and popular culture, adn the voices of the women themselves.Caribbean: ISER, University of the West Indies

Longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award 2023 by the League of Canadian Poets. Hurricane Watch: New and Collected Poems brings together Jamaican Poet Laureate Olive Senior's first four books of poetry alongside a new collection. Recipient of the Musgrave Gold Medal in 2005 from the Institute of Jamaica, Senior has long been recognised as a skilful and evocative storyteller but what this book shows is the consistency and range of her achievement.Senior's poems are delicate, formally playful and always finely observed, whether responding to Jamaican birdlife, the larger natural world or the traces of a complicated historical inheritance. Often, and always surprisingly, her poems' brilliant descriptions and vivid, gripping narratives open out into ecological reflections, politics and culture in original, surprising and sensuous ways.

The popular West Indian migration narrative often starts with the “Windrush Generation” in 1950’s England, but in Dying to Better Themselves Olive Senior examines an earlier narrative: that of the neglected post-emancipation generation of the 1850’s who were lured to Panama by the promise of lucrative work and who initiated a pattern of circular migration that would transform the islands economically, socially and politically well into the twentieth century.West Indians provided the bulk of the workforce for the construction of the Panama Railroad and the Panama Canal, and between 1850 and 1914 untold numbers sacrificed their lives, limbs and mental faculties to the Panama projects. Many West Indians remained as settlers, their descendants now citizens of Panama; many returned home with enough of a nest egg to better themselves; and others launched themselves elsewhere in the Americas as work beckoned.Senior tells the compelling story of the West Indian rite of passage of “Going to Panama” and captures the complexities behind the iconic “Colón Man”. Drawing on official records, contemporary newspapers, journals and books, songs, sayings, and literature, and the words of the participants themselves, Senior answers the questions as to who went to Panama, how and why; she describes the work they did there, the conditions under which they lived, the impact on their homelands when they returned or on the host societies when they stayed.Many books have shown the “conquest” of the Isthmus of Panama by land and sea exploring how the myriad individual lives touched by the construction of the railroad and the canal changed the world as well.