ABSTRACT
Born in 1949 in St John’s, Antigua, as Elaine Potter Richardson, Jamaica
Kincaid is one of the Caribbean’s most distinguished women writers. She
left Antigua at seventeen, before independence reached the island, and
travelled to New York where she worked as an au-pair and a recep-
tionist, and wrote for a magazine. She changed her name in 1973 and
became a staff writer for the New Yorker in 1976. Her first stories
appeared in Rolling Stone magazine, Paris Review and the New Yorker.
She received her first literary award in 1983, for her collection of short
