Olive Senior – författare

Early in the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, Olive Senior began posting her series of Pandemic Poems on social media. The project was a way of bearing witness to the strangeness of it all and forging a reassuring connection with readers. Each poem is a riff on a word or phrase trending in the first wave of the pandemic - an A to Z of the lexicon newly coined or quickly repurposed for our historic moment. By presenting these words and phrases in sequence, Senior offers a timeline of the way events unfolded and how the language and preoccupations kept changing in response. In this accessible collection, Senior captures the zeitgeist of 2020.

"Generations to come will read these poems and chart the shifts we''ve been making or not making as a global community linked by a singular virus bearing multiple challenges. We''ve needed these poems, and we continue to ever more."-Faizal Deen, author of The Greatest Films

"Olive Senior''s Pandemic Poems invite, seduce and require us to think and feel in new ways about the intersecting crises of this terrible year. I was moved to laughter, to weeping, and to silence by these poems. They are essential reading."-Rachel L. Mordecai, author of Citizenship under Pressure: The 1970s in Jamaican Literature and Culture

"In Pandemic Poems, Olive Senior captures the sense of dread that has affected us since the virus has crept into our lives. . . . Senior transforms seemingly mundane events into meditations on mortality. Pandemic Poems offers a much-needed respite from the deluge of data that surrounds us and provides moments to pause and, perhaps, find peace."-Geoffrey Philp, author of Garvey''s Ghost

Winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, The Pain Tree is Olive Senior at her very best, unforgettable short stories set in Jamaica and Canada, now available in this beautiful UK and Caribbean edition from Peepal Tree Press.Olive Senior’s new collection of stories, The Pain Tree, is wide-ranging in scope, time period, theme, locale, and voice. There is — along with her characteristic “gossipy voice” — reverence, wit and wisdom, satire, humour, and even farce. The stories range over at most a hundred years, from around the time of the second world war to the present. Like her earlier stories, Jamaica is the setting but the range of characters presented are universally recognisable as people in crisis or on the cusp of transformation.

While most of the stories operate within a realist mode, Senior also exploits traditional motifs. Collected here are revenge stories (“The Goodness of my Heart”), a bargain with the Devil (“Boxed-in”), a Cinderella story (“The Country Cousin”), a magical realist interpretation of African spiritual beliefs (“Flying”) and a narrator’s belated acceptance of the healing power of traditional beliefs (“The Pain Tree”). “Coal” is a realist story set in the war years and depression that followed as folks try to find a new place in the world. Senior’s trademark children awakening to self-awareness and to the hypocrisy of adults are here too, from the heartbreaking “Moonlight” and “Silent” to the girls in “Lollipop” and “A Father Like That” who learn to confront loneliness and vulnerability with attitude.