Ms. Senior was born in rural Jamaica, deep rural, really in the bush, and went to school in Montego Bay.  She grew up the daugther of peasent farmers, she grew up with well-off relatives whose lifestyle was different then what it was went she was younger.  Ms. Senior is the author of both poetry and short stories.  Ms. Senior explores the tension of urban and rural setting in her poetry and fiction.  Olive Senior was trained as a journalist, obtaining her degree in Canada from Carleton  University in Ottawa in 1967.  Also, she spent much of her life working in the book publishing industry in Jamaica.  In her writing, she adopts the girls point of view on such things as religion, and race, and Jamaican speech by alternating from English to the Creolized language.  Ms. Senior divides her time up by Toronto and Kingston, Jamcica where she is a writer in residence at the Unversity of Alberta, Canada.  She won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, for Arrival of the Snake Woman (1989) and Discerner of Hearts (1995).  Some of her works are Talking Of Trees,  Summer Lightning & Other Stories.   Arrival of the Snake Woman.  Gardening in the Tropics.  One of her most recent works is a book called "The View from the Terrance". Ms. Senior said that "she wanted to present her writing to the Caribbean people as real people, with fears and couage, the same as anybody else in the world".  As we can see is that Ms. Senior is a very real person that has been though a lot to get where she is right now.  This helps in her writings to become real to the reader and for us to get a picture in our head.  Ms. Senior is a great writer who appreciates the works that she writes.

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