Olive Senior was born in Jamaica, has been based in Toronto, Canada, since 1993. She has published several prize-winning books, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize–winning collection of stories, Summer Lightning (1986), three other books of fiction, and the poetry books Talking of Trees (1985), Gardening in the Tropics (1994, winner of the F.J. Bressani Literary Prize), Over the Roofs of the World (2005, shortlisted for Canada’s Governor-General’s Literary Award and Cuba’s Casa de las Américas Prize), and Shell (shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award).