Oonya Kempadoo s a UK, Guyanese, Grenadian citizen, and a permanent resident of Montreal, Canada. Born in Sussex, England to Guyanese parents with Indo-Caribbean ancestry, Kempadoo is truly a citizen of the world, having lived in Trinidad, St. Lucia, Tobago, Grenada and Guyana, studied art in Amsterdam, taught creative writing in the USA and led workshops in the Caribbean and with the Quebec Writers Federation.
Fiction
All Decent Animals
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
PR9320.9.K46 A79 2013
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Oonya Kempadoo’s moving third novel, All Decent Animals, looks at the personal and aesthetic choices of a multifaceted cast of characters on the Caribbean island of Trinidad—a country still developing economically but rich culturally, aiming at “world-class” status amid its poor island cousins. It is a novel about relationships, examined through the distinct rhythms of the city of Port of Spain.
Loyalties, love, conflicting cultures, and creativity come into play as Ata, a young woman working in carnival design but curious about writing, and her European boyfriend, Pierre, negotiate the care of their friend Fraser, a closeted gay man dying from AIDS. The contradictory Trinidadian setting becomes a parallel character to Fraser’s Cambridge-derived artistic sensibility and an antagonist to Ata’s creative journey.
All Decent Animals is a forthright inquiry into the complexity of character, social issues, and island society, with all the island’s humor, mysticism, and tragedy.
Fiction
Buxton Spice
London: Phoenix House, 1998.
PR9320.9.K46 B89 1998
Also published New York: Dutton/Plume, 1999.
Boston: Beacon Press, 2004. (book cover shown)
Synopsis (From the author’s website)
Buxton Spice, is a coming of age story set in the multi-racial society of Guyana disintegrating under a corrupt government.
Fiction
Naniki
Toronto: Rare Machines, an imprint of Dundurn Press, 2024.
e-book (Access restricted to members of the university community)
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Through luminescent light, ancestral paths, and a Caribbean spirit-inflected world, Naniki explores the musings and inner workings of the deep blue — the Caribbean Sea — and its shape-shifting sea beings.
As the sea mirrors the light from the blue skies, and its depths are exposed by daggers of sunlight, so too Naniki reveals and honours the Indigenous roots of the Caribbean and its people, whose destiny is tied to the sea, the vessel of collective memory.
Amana and Skelele are made of water and air, their essence intertwined with Taino and African ancestry. They evolved as elemental beings of the Anthropocene, and shape-shifting with their naniki (active spirits) or animal avatars, they begin an archipelagic journey throughout the Caribbean Basin to see the strange future they dreamed of. Until devastation erupts.
Tasked by their elders to go back in time to the source of the First People’s knowledge, they must surmount historical and mythological challenges alike. How can they navigate and overcome these obstacles to regenerate themselves, their love, their islands, and their seas?
Awards and Honours
2024 Governor General’s Literary Awards-English Fiction (Finalist)
2024 Guyana Prize for Literature (Winner)
Fiction
Tide Running
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. (book cover shown)
Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.
PR9320.9.K46 T54 2004
Publisher’s Synopsis (From the Beacon Press website)
Cliff and Ossi have grown up in Plymouth on the island of Tobago, their lives turning on the axis of small-town life. One day they watch the arrival of a couple and their child at a luxurious house overlooking the ocean. The couple invites Cliff into their home and lives, and in that cool’flim-style’ house, the harsh, brittle life of urban Plymouth is kept briefly at bay, desires obscuring differences in class and race. But then things begin to go wrong-money vanishes, the couple’s car disappears-and those differences are brought suddenly to light, raising unsettling questions about relationships, wealth, and responsibility.
Links
Oonya Kempadoo personal website
Publisher Beacon Press
Publisher Dundurn Press
Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers