PRESENT: LITERATURE

Jamaica Kincaid is celebrated worldwide as one of the most important and influential writers today.

She is admired for her stylistic gifts no less than for her subject matter. Her writing is a way of empowerment over the limitations of race and gender, infused with tantalizing irony, anger and frustration, delving into the depths of emotion without being sentimental. She casts the plight of her characters into beautiful evocative prose by creating a masterfully crafted world.

As one of the most unique voices in both postcolonial and women’s literature she thus became one of the most influential authors in these two emerging, and by now – canonical and major, fields of literature. Her distinctive voice made her both one of the finest writers of her generation and of our times as well as one of the most influential, both in English literature and in literature written by minorities.

Jamaica Kincaid has received numerous distinguished awards, amongst them Morton Dauwen Zabel Award for fiction (1984); the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for fiction (1985); the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for The Autobiography of My Mother (1997); the Lannan Literary Award for fiction (1999); the Prix Femina étranger for My Brother (2000); the Before Columbus Foundation Book Award for See Now Then (2014) and she holds honorary doctorates from several universities.