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JAMAICA KINCAID
Jamaica Kincaid was born on May 25, 1949, as Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson.
She is a Caribbean novelist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in the city of St. John's
on the island of Antigua in the nation of Antigua and Barbuda. Elaine never knew her biological
father, a taxi driver named Roderick Potter. Her mother, Annie Richardson, a homemaker and
stepfather, David Drew; who was a carpenter, nurtured Elaine as their child. . In Antigua, she
completed her secondary education under the British system due to Antigua's status as a British
colony until 1967 where she won a scholarship to the Princess Margaret School.
In her early childhood, she was very close to her mother, as she was the only child; until
the age of nine. When she was nine years old her mother gave birth to three sons in quick
succession and this altered their relationship for ever. Kincaid says that she was treated badly and
that she was neglected. Once the center of her mother's attention, Elaine was sidelined while her
brothers were encouraged to achieve a university education. At 13, Elaine's mother pulled her out
of school to help her ailing stepfather. At the age of 17, she was sent to America to work as an au
pair, to support her family in Antigua, and eventually to become a nurse. Later, as an adult,
Kincaid would express the following about this situation and her relationship with her mother:
“I don't know if having other children was the cause for our relationship
changing--it might have changed as I entered adolescence, but her attention went
elsewhere. And also our family money remained the same but there were more people to
feed and to clothe and so everything got sort of shortened not only material things but
emotional things, the good emotional things I got a short end of that.”

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While in America, her feelings of alienation and bitterness gave way to her refusal to
respond to her mother’s letters and she eventually stopped sending money back home to her
family. In an interview Jamaica Kincaid states that:
"My family ... my mother and step-father planned distinctive lives. My brothers
were going to be gentlemen of achievement; one was going to be Prime Minister, one a
doctor, one a Minister, things like that. I never heard anybody say that I was going to be
anything except maybe a nurse. There was no huge future for me, nothing planned…”
Instead of nursing, she studied photography at the New School for Social Research; she
then went to study at Franconia College in New Hampshire without collecting her degree for
photography study. In 1973, Elaine changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid in order to write
anonymously. For three years, Kincaid worked as a freelance writer until William Shawn, the
editor of the New Yorker, hired her as a staff writer. In time she took over the "Talk of the Town"
column. Encouraged by her editor, Kincaid began to write fiction, which was often published as
installments in the New Yorker. Kincaid's first collection of short stories, At the Bottom of the
River (1983), won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award of the American Academy and Institute of
Arts and Letters. The predominately autobiographical Annie John (1985) was critically
acclaimed for its universal appeal as a coming-of-age story and for its treatment of indigenous
Caribbean culture. Kincaid describes the launch of her new writing career as a means of escaping
the harsh reality she was faced with following the birth of her brothers and the emotional
distance created between her and her mother. She states “But then I got more of things I didn't
have, like a certain kind of cruelty and neglect... If I hadn't become a writer I don't know what
would have happened to me; that was a kind of self rescuing.”

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Jamaica Kincaid has cultivated a voice distinct from male Caribbean writers such as
Derek Walcott by using life to inspire fiction. The work of Kincaid has been identified as loosely
autobiographical work; though Kincaid has warned against interpreting their autobiographical
elements too literally. She explains that "Everything I say is true, and everything I say is not true.
You couldn't admit any of it to a court of law. It would not be good evidence." Kincaid often
explores the complexity of mother-daughter relationships as seen in “Annie John”, the effects
and aftereffects of colonialism. Her work also transcends Afro-centric and feminist perspectives.
Her deceptively simple prose is marked by poetic lyricism, vivid imagery, and nonlinear time.
She has received the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the Prix Femina Étranger, the
Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award, amongst many other
awards during her writing career.
Kincaid married her editor's son, Allen Shawn, a composer and Bennington College
professor and they had a daughter, Annie, in 1985 and a son, Harold, in 1989. Kincaid and her
family reside in North Bennington, Vermont. She is a converted Judaist and is currently a
visiting lecturer on African and African American Studies and on English and American
Literature and Language at Harvard University during the summer and at Claremont McKenna
College in Claremont, California, during the academic year.