Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson, in 1949 in St. John's, Antigua. As an only child, Kincaid maintained a close relationship with her mother until the age of nine, when the first of her three brothers were born. The growing size of the family not only brought about a "keener sense of their poverty" but also enhanced Kincaid's growing sense of isolation from her mother and her environment. Much of Kincaid's writing is intimately inspired by these tensions of her youth. The emotional onset of adolescence, as well as the rigid control of a British colonial education system heightened Kincaid's sense of isolation. Kincaid, while considered bright by her teachers, was also labeled as troublesome and sullen. It was at this time in her young life when Kincaid started her retreat into reading and stealing books. She says: When I was a child I liked to read. . . I didn't know anyone else who liked to read except my mother, and it got me in a lot of trouble because it made me into a thief and a liar. I stole books, and I stole money to buy them. . . Books brought me the greatest satisfaction. Just to be alone, reading, under the house with lizards and spiders running around·." (Kincaid in Garis, 42)

At the age of 17, with a growing ambivalence for her family and a rising contempt for the subservience of the Antiguans to British colonialist rule, Kincaid left Antigua, bound for New York and a job as an au pair. After working for three years and taking night classes at a community college, Kincaid won a full-scholarship to Franconia College in New Hampshire. However, after a year of feeling "too old to be a student," Kincaid dropped out of school, returned to New York, secured a job writing interviews for a teen-age girls' magazine, and changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid.

It was at this time that Kincaid's work in The Village Voice and Ingenue magazine drew the attention of the legendary editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn. Kincaid reported in an interview with Dwight Garner that "it was William Shawn who showed me what my voice was. . . He made me feel that what I thought, my inner life, my thoughts as I organized them, were important. That they made literature" (salon.com). She became a staff writer for the magazine in 1976 and a featured columnist for the highly visible "Talk of the Town" section of the magazine for the next nine years. In 1978, Kincaid's first piece of fiction was published in The New Yorker, and it later became part of her first book, At the Bottom of the River (1983). This short story collection, composed of a series of lyrical vignettes or "prose poems," focuses on the growing consciousness of a young girl in the Caribbean (Contemporary African American Novelists, 261).

For its mesmerizing prose and gripping, dreamlike repetition, At the Bottom of the River was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Morton Darwen Zabel Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Two years later, in 1985, Kincaid published her first novel, Annie John, a story that many critics consider an expansion and refinement of the ideas originally presented in At the Bottom of the River. In Annie John, Kincaid once again draws upon the angst, isolation, and wonder of her own childhood in Antigua, to craft a touching narrative about the tenuous nature of mother-daughter relationships. The protagonist Annie John -- much like Kincaid in her youth -- is a willful, intelligent 10-year old who grows increasingly confused and cynical throughout her teenage years.

For her work on Annie John, Kincaid was selected as one of three finalists for the 1985 international Ritz Paris Hemingway Award. In addition, Kincaid is a recipient of the Anifield-Wolf Book Award and The Lila-Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund Award. She also received a nomination for the 1997 National Book Award for My Brother, a gripping chronicle of her relationship with her youngest brother, during his losing battle with AIDS. In 2004, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Perhaps the single most striking quality in Kincaid's writing is its honesty, or what Susan Sontag called its "emotional truthfulness." Derek Walcott, renowned West Indian poet, essayist, and playwright comments further on the multifaceted appeal of Kincaid's writing: "As she writes a sentence, the temperature of it psychologically is that it heads toward it own contradiction. It's as if the sentence is discovering itself, discovering how it feels. And that is astonishing, because it's one thing to be able to write a good declarative sentence; it's another thing to catch the temperature of the narrator, the narrator's feeling. And that's universal, and not provincial in any way" (In Garis, 80).

Kincaid's writing is compelling because it captures complex emotions and exposes divisive issues in a deceptively simple style. Her other major works include Annie, Gwen, Lilly, Pam and Tulip (1986), A Small Place (1988), Autobiography of My Mother (1996), My Brother (1997), Talk Stories (2000), My Garden (Book) (2001) and Mr. Potter (2002). Her latest book is Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya.

A visiting professor at Harvard University, where she teaches creative writing, Kincaid is at work on a new novel, See Now Then, about a family in the small village of North Bennington, Vermont where she lives with her husband, Allen Shawn, a composer and son of the former editor of The New Yorker, and their two children.

She currently is at work on a new novel, See Now Then.

Bibliography

Annie John, New American Library, 1986
A Small Place, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1988
Annie, Gwen, Lilly, Pam and Tulip, Random House, 1989
Lucy, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1990
At The Bottom of the River, Plume, 1992
The Autobiography of My Mother, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996
My Brother, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1997
Talk Stories, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2001
My Garden, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2001
Mr. Potter, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2003
Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas, National Geographic Society, 2003