Jamaica Kincaid

Born Elaine Potter Richardson in St. John's, Antigua, she was pulled from school and sent to New York at seventeen to work as an au pair, sending money home until she cut off her family and reinvented herself under a new name, writing her way into The New Yorker under William Shawn's patronage.

Annie John (1985) drew closely on her own Antiguan girlhood, tracing a daughter's intense devotion to her mother as it curdles into fury and estrangement, colonial schooling's petty humiliations woven through the more private rupture at the book's center.

She has continued to write essay-sharp, unsparing prose across fiction and nonfiction, including A Small Place, her scalding indictment of Antiguan tourism and its colonial residue, while teaching for years at Harvard and Claremont McKenna.