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.
Lally-May’s episode with the rolling half and Jonkanoo had
them mesmerised and a little frightened, because many of them had never heard of
the myth of the rolling calf, and only a handful had ever seen Jonkanoo. Again,
a lively discussion of ‘scary’ things and how brave they were when they had to
face frightening things. A few of the boys demonstrated some karate moves that
they would use to fight the Jonkanoo if ever faced with the Lally-May scenario.
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.
Two short migrations at two key stages of her life,
opened Melanie’s eyes to the cultural and social discriminations in society, and
thus began her quest for understanding through writing. At the age of five
she moved to England with her family, where she was awakened to the nature of colour
prejudice, and then during her late teens and early twenties, she
attended the University of South Carolina, where the subtle traits of discrimination
cemented her interest in the social repercussions of these prejudices.
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.
Diana won the Hollick Arvon Prize for Caribbean writing in
2014, for her non fiction work-in-progress
Loving Jamaica: a memoir of place and (not) belonging.
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.
