Biography
Early Life
In 1985, Jamaica Kincaid received the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for fiction.
Through her unique writing, Jamaica Kincaid explores themes of colonialism and relationships.
The former Elaine Potter Richardson was born on May 25, 1949, on the island of Antigua.
Because her mother loved to read, they spent a great deal of time in the library.
By age three and a half, Elaine was reading on her own. She developed a deep love of reading. At that point, her mother enrolled Elaine in the local school.
As a child, she saw her mother talking to herself while completing house chores. Elaine mimicked the practice and it became a part of her writing process.
The family was poor. When her mom gave birth to the first of three younger brothers, things became more difficult for nine-year-old Elaine.
In 1965, when she was around age sixteen, Richardson left Antigua to work in New York as an au-pair.
Richardson continued this work for three years. She went to night school while she worked. She earned her GED and studied photography.
In 1970, Richardson left New York and went to college in New Hampshire. For assorted reasons, she dropped out after only a year and returned to New York.
Writing Career
Back in New York, Richardson wrote poetry and articles for The Village Voice and Ingenue magazine. She also changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid.
A turning point in Kincaid’s writing career occurred when New Yorker editor William Shawn published notes she wrote about the annual West Indian Day parade in Brooklyn.
Kincaid was learning to write fiction and felt “in the dark” about her writing career. She was surprised because she did not expect Shawn to publish her notes without any changes.
Kincaid calls that incident “a crucial thing in my writing life…it taught me about what my voice was.”
Writing Awards
Since the publication of those notes, Kincaid authored numerous short stories and more than 20 award-winning fiction and non-fiction books. In addition, she has received many awards.
Kincaid’s honors include the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and the American Book Award.
In 2024, she will receive the 56th St. Louis Literary Award. Kincaid has honorary degrees from eleven colleges and universities.
Currently, she is a Professor of African and African American Studies and English at Harvard University.
Activism Through Experience
Kincaid was born in Antigua while it was still under British rule. Her writings speak to her life experiences.
She had a strained relationship with her mother, and her books explore relationships between mothers and daughters.
Eventually, Kincaid recognized similarities in the dynamic between some mothers and daughters and the relationships between the powerful and the powerless.
One interviewer asked Kincaid if her writing was a form of political activism. She explained, “When I write, I am thinking things that you would consider political, … but I think just to get out of bed and breathe is a form of political activity.”
While she writes of political subjects, Kincaid says, for her, writing is “an act of survival.”
