Born in Ghana in 1962, Kwame Dawes moved to Jamaica in 1971 and spent most of his childhood and early adult life there. As well as poetry, he is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and plays; he also practices as…

Velma Pollard was born in 1937. She grew up in Woodside, a rural Jamaican village, where her mother was a school teacher and her father was a farmer: their interest in the arts was to be one of the main…

Tanya Shirley is a startlingly bold writer with a particular gift for highlighting the telling detail in her vivid and arresting poems, which variously contain portraits of lovers, colourful eccentrics and family snapshots that capture the elusive magic of childhood…

Grace Nichols is a poet whose work has been central to our understanding of the important cultural Caribbean-British connection for nearly 3 decades. From her first collection, I Is a Long Memoried Woman (1983), to her more recent work such…

A unique and energetic force in contemporary British poetry, John Agard’s poems combine acute social observation, puckish wit and a riotous imagination to thrilling effect. Born in Guyana, South America in 1949, Agard moved to Britain in the late seventies….

Mervyn Morris (b, 1937) remains one of the most resourceful and technically brilliant of Caribbean poets. After studying at the University College of the West Indies, and winning a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, he embarked on an academic career which…

Linton Kwesi Johnson was born on 24 August, 1952 in Chapelton, a small town in the rural parish of Clarendon, Jamaica. He came to London in 1963, attended Tulse Hill secondary school, and later studied Sociology at Goldsmiths’ College, University…

Edward Baugh is probably best known as a literary critic whose distinguished academic career has been devoted to West Indian literature, especially the study of Anglophone Caribbean poetry, and in particular the work of the towering Nobel Laureate, Derek Walcott,…

Olive Senior is a singularly original writer with a genius for re-inhabiting and recreating the wonder and cruel theatre of childhood, while also exploring adult pretensions and realities in relation to history, locality and the multifarious and revelatory world of…

Lorna Goodison is one of the finest Caribbean poets of her generation and lauded as such by Kwame Dawes in the Caribbean Writer: “Superlatives glint all over commentary on Lorna Goodison’s work… she is now one of the greatest!” Goodison…

Benjamin Zephaniah was born in Birmingham, and grew up in Jamaica and in Handsworth, where he was sent to an approved school. He left school at 13 unable to read or write and was imprisoned for burglary. His political anger…

“Raise high the roofbeams, here comes a strong new presence in poetry,” wrote Lorna Goodison when Kei Miller burst onto the poetry scene with his 2006 debut Kingdom of Empty Bellies. Miller was born in Jamaica in 1978 and read…

E A Markham (1939-2008) had a career that embraced the range of literary life, and more. Aside from his poetry, for which he was nominated for the T S Eliot Prize in 2002, he wrote novels, essays, plays and short…

Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze (b. 1956) was brought up by her grandparents who were peasant farmers in rural Jamaica. She studied at the Jamaican School of Drama before travelling to Britain when she was thirty with the poet Linton Kwesi Johnson,…

James Berry (1924 – 2017) spent his childhood in a village in Jamaica, before working in the United States, finally settling in Britain in 1948 where he remained for the rest of his life. One of the first black writers…