Joan riley whos who in america

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Intro Novelist
Is Writer Novelist
From Jamaica
Field Literature
Gender female
Birth 26 May 1958, Jamaica
Age 64 years

The details (from wikipedia)

Biography

Joan Riley (born 26 May 1958) is a Jamaican-British author. Her 1985 novel The Unbelonging made her "the first Afro-Caribbean woman author to write about the experiences of Blacks in England".

Biography

Joan Riley was born in Hopewell, Richmond, St. Mary, Jamaica, the youngest of eight children (six girls and two boys), and was raised by her father after her mother died in childbirth. She received her early education on that island before emigrating to the United Kingdom in 1976. There she studied social work at the University of Sussex and the University of London. She has worked at a drugs advisory agency and wrote about the experiences of Caribbean women.

She is the author of four novels; her first, The Unbelonging, published in 1985, is considered the first by a woman about the black experience in Britain. Riley was awarded the Voice award for her work in 1992, and the MIND prize in 1993 for A Kindness to the Children. She has been featured in such anthologies as Daughters of Africa and Her True-True Name. She co-edited with Briar Wood Leave to Stay: Stories of Exile and Belonging (Virago, 1996), a collection of fiction and poetry by writers from India, the Caribbean, China, South Africa, the USSR, Canada, Australia and Pakistan, including Sujata Bhatt, Fred D'Aguiar, Michael Donaghy, Jane Duran, Michael Hoffman, Aamer Hussein, Mimi Khalvati, Adam Lively, Sindiwe Magona, Bharati Mukherjee, Hanan al-Shaykh, Janice Shinebourne and Zinovy Zinik.

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Why Has It Taken So Long?

'The first novel by a West Indian born woman has just been published in Britain. But why has it taken so long to happen?' (Bishop 27). This question, posed in 1985 on the publication of Joan Riley's The Unbelonging, was certainly a legitimate one. Nearly twenty years on, we can perhaps extend this query to, 'Why has Joan Riley not been accepted as one of the foremost contemporary writers in Britain today?' By 1996 she had published a further three novels and contributed to and co-edited a collection of short stories by 'literary exiles'. Despite a comparatively quiet period since then, Riley remains the most published black woman writer in Britain today and yet one of the least recognised and discussed.

Already, some important issues are beginning to appear. Should Riley's work merit special attention because of its contribution to one or all of the (contested) canons of black British writing, contemporary women's writing and/or black women's writing? Or should her work be judged in isolation from such compartmentalising activities? It should be possible to do both. Riley's writing does not require any special pleading, but it does sit at a point of multiple intersecting concerns--literary, historical, theoretical and social--that demand attention. One consequence of this is a tendency to read Riley's fiction as a social document concerned with issues of racism, patriarchy and national identity and this diverts attention away from considerations of its literary worth. Furthermore, this blurring of the boundary between realism and reality in Riley's work has generated anxiety due to her unflinching depictions of racial prejudice, sexual violence and psychological trauma. As will be explained further below, such passages have tended to induce defensive responses across a wide range of readers. In doing so, Riley's work raises significant questions relating to the function of literature in the modern world, the identification of reading constituencies and the role of narrative in shaping personal and social realities. By confronting such issues in Riley's work, it becomes possible to highlight the intimate relationship between the literary and the real in a manner that addresses both literary quality and contextual significance.

A Modified Realism

Joan Riley was born in St Mary's, Jamaica, in 1958 and migrated to England as a young adult, where she attended Sussex and London universities. She has since remained resident in England. This dual experience of life in both the Caribbean and in the metropolitan centre locates Riley's work within a tradition of writing established by the writers of the Windrush generation of the 1950s. Sam Selvon, George Lamming, Wilson Harris and Andrew Salkey were seminal figures in a period that saw the 'birth' of the West Indian novel as one consequence of post-war migrations to Britain. Two key modes of production and reception bind these writers together and provide clear links to Riley's work. Firstly, they employed the social realist genre established by C. L. R. James as the dominant mode of expression of the West Indian novel...

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Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 Boydell & Brewer Inc.

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Gale Document Number: GALE|A133014747

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