Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson on May 25, 1949. She lived with her Dominican homemaker mother and Antiguan carpenter stepfather as an only child until the age of nine when her three brothers were born in quick succession. Kincaid was a precocious child and excelled at her studies, attending Antigua girls’ school and then Princess Margaret School, government institutions whose curricula were modeled on the British system of education. At the age of 17, Kincaid left for New York to work as an au pair, then studied photography, attended college in New Hampshire, and began a journalistic career writing articles for magazines. In 1973 she changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid and three years later became a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, a position that would last a decade. In 1983 Kincaid published her first collection of short stories, At the Bottom of the River, which includes some tales that had initially appeared in the New Yorker. She would go on to publish the novels Annie John (1985), Lucy (1990), and Autobiography of My Mother (1994). Kincaid has also produced nonfiction works: A Small Place (1988), a savage indictment of both the British colonial legacy in Antigua and the complacency of the post-independence generation of politicians; My Brother (1997), a biography of her brother who died of AIDS; and My Garden (2000), which not only explores the pleasures and pains of cultivating plants but also the historical effect of imperialism and trade on gardens.
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