Jamaica Kincaid was born in Antigua, a small island in the West Indies, in 1949. Jamaica never met her biological father and her mother soon remarried. After attending primary school during the time of the British colonisation, Jamaica left the island and migrated to New York. She first worked as an au-pair, then went through several different working experiences, eventually becoming a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her stories have appeared in the Paris Review, Rolling Stone and The New Yorker. Her first book, At the Bottom of the River (1983), was awarded the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her most recent novel,

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