Melanie
Schwapp:
I read at Holy Childhood Prep.
School to the Kindergarten classes. I read Abigail’s
Glorious Hair by Diane Browne and ‘Lally-May’s Farm
Suss’ written by me.
Abigail’s Glorious Hair sparked a lively
discussion about hair and the joys and stresses of combing it. Many of the
girls were thrilled to show that they had the same hairstyle as Abigail. Some
of the boys expounded on going to the barber and the fact that they did not
have to comb their hair every day.
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Bio:
Melanie Schwapp was born in Kingston, Jamaica. She
attended Montego Bay High School in St. James from 1st to 5th form, then was
enrolled in St. Andrew High School for Girls in 1982 to sit her A’level exams.
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Although Melanie has written recreationally all her
life, her first published work was a children’s book, Lally-May’s Farm Suss in
2005 in which she revives a Jamaican myth and several cultural aspects through
the eyes of a child. Her second publication was the novel Dew Angels in 2011
where she explores the hidden aspect of prejudice and other social
handicaps in Jamaican society. Having fallen in love with the rural lifestyle while
growing up on her
grandparents’ farm in Montego Bay, Melanie also does
small garden landscaping and interior decorating. She is a devoted mother to
her three children and a sometimes devoted wife to her
husband. She resides in Kingston.
Diana McCaulay:
I read at Hopefield Prep on May 9th from my new
YA novel Gone to Drift, which placed
second in the CODE Burt Prize for Caribbean literature and won the Lignum Vitae
Vic Reid Award, both in 2015. The children
seemed to enjoy the reading – they were very engaged and had lots of questions.
Bio:
Diana McCaulay is an award winning Jamaican writer and a
lifelong resident of its capital city Kingston.
She has written two critically acclaimed novels, Dog-Heart (March 2010) and Huracan
(July 2012), published by Peepal Tree Press in the United Kingdom. Dog-Heart
won a Gold Medal in the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission’s National
Creative Writing Awards (2008), was
shortlisted for the Guyana Prize (2011), the IMPAC Dublin Award (2012) and the
Saroyan Prize for International Writing (2012). Huracan
was also shortlisted for the 2014 Saroyan Prize. Her third novel, Gone to Drift (February 29, 2016) is
published by Papilote Press, placed second in the Burt Prize for Caribbean
Literature and won the Lignum Vitae Vic Reid Award in 2015.
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Diana founded the Jamaica Environment Trust (JET) in 1991
and still serves as its CEO and guiding force.
She was a popular newspaper
columnist for The Gleaner (1994-2001) and her short fiction has been published
by the journal Eleven Eleven, Granta On Line, Fleeting Magazine, The Caribbean
Writer, Afro-Beat, Lifestyle Magazine and the Jamaica Observer’s literary
supplement, Bookends. She was the regional winner of the
Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2012, for her short story The Dolphin Catchers.
Diana was born into the Jamaican upper-middle class and
has spent a lifetime pondering questions of race, class, colour, and privilege
in Jamaican society. The honest and
penetrating insights in her novels and stories come from sharp observation and
profound self-reflection. Hers is a
uniquely authentic voice from a background which usually turns away from all
that she unflinchingly faces.
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