Olive Senior is a central figure in any account of contemporary Caribbean writing. She won the Commonwealth Writer's Prize in 1987 with her collection of short stories, Summer Lightning and Other Stories (1986), which established her firmly as an important new writer, a reputation she has since consolidated with her second collection, Arrival of the Snake-Woman and Other Stories (1989), and her latest collection, Discerner of Hearts (1995). Senior has also played a vital role in putting women's issues on the literary agenda of her region. She was one of the contributors to the first anthology in her region that focused exclusively on women poets, Jamaica Woman: An Anthology of Poems (1980), and she continued to foreground women's experiences in her collections of poems Talking of Trees (1985) and Gardening in the Tropics (1994) as well as in her collections of stories.

Beyond her fine contributions to Caribbean literature, Senior is significant in the broader...