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Authors by Country · The CaribbeanThe Best Caribbean Authors to Read
Caribbean literature is written in English, French, Spanish and Creole, across islands with very different colonial histories. What connects it is a set of shared questions: slavery and its aftermath, migration to London, Paris and New York, language and dialect, and who gets to tell the region’s story. The Caribbean has produced Nobel laureates in literature, Prix Goncourt and Booker Prize winners, and a body of poetry, novels and essays that changed postcolonial writing.
The list is ordered chronologically by year of birth and covers the anglophone, francophone and hispanophone Caribbean; each entry names the island or country. Every writer has at least one book available in English, written in English or translated from French or Spanish. Canonical names sit alongside living novelists.
Twelve Caribbean authors, and where to start with each
Jean Rhys
1890–1979 · Roseau, Dominica
Rhys was born in Dominica and moved to England as a teenager. Her novels of the 1920s and 1930s, among them Quartet, Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight, follow women drifting through Paris and London on little money, dependent on men and stripped of illusions.
After decades out of print she returned with Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which won the WH Smith Literary Award in 1967. It gives a Creole past to Bertha Mason, the ‘madwoman in the attic’ of Jane Eyre, and remains a core text of Caribbean and postcolonial fiction.
Read Rhys if you want a short, sharp novel that rewrites a classic from the margins.
Start with Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). The story of Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress in post-emancipation Jamaica, before she becomes the first Mrs Rochester of Jane Eyre. Or Good Morning, Midnight (1939). A middle-aged Englishwoman returns to Paris and drifts between cafés and hotel rooms, haunted by her past.
All Jean Rhys books →Alejo Carpentier
1904–1980 · Lausanne, Switzerland; raised in Havana, Cuba
Carpentier was long believed to have been born in Havana; his birth certificate, found after his death, places his birth in Lausanne, but he grew up in Cuba and wrote as a Cuban. In the preface to El reino de este mundo he set out the idea of lo real maravilloso, the ‘marvellous real’ of Latin American history.
His novels move through Caribbean and Latin American history: the Haitian Revolution in The Kingdom of This World, a journey up a South American river in The Lost Steps (1953), the French Revolution reaching the Antilles in Explosion in a Cathedral (1962). He received the Cervantes Prize in 1977.
Read Carpentier if you want history told as something stranger than fiction.
Start with The Kingdom of This World (1949). El reino de este mundo: the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath seen through Ti Noël, an enslaved man, in a short novel available in English translation. Or Explosion in a Cathedral (1962). El siglo de las luces: the ideas and guillotine of the French Revolution arrive in the Caribbean.
Aimé Césaire
1913–2008 · Basse-Pointe, Martinique
Césaire was a poet, playwright and politician from Martinique. With Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas he launched the négritude movement in Paris in the 1930s, and he coined the word itself. His long poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal first appeared in 1939.
Discours sur le colonialisme (1950) is a short, furious essay comparing European colonialism with Nazism. He served as mayor of Fort-de-France from 1945 to 2001, and both the poem and the essay are available in English translation.
Read Césaire if you want the poem and essay at the root of postcolonial thought in French.
Start with Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939). Cahier d’un retour au pays natal: a long poem about returning to Martinique and claiming a Black identity against colonial contempt. Or Discourse on Colonialism (1950). Discours sur le colonialisme: an essay arguing that colonialism degrades the coloniser as well as the colonised.
Sam Selvon
1923–1994 · San Fernando, Trinidad
Selvon moved from Trinidad to London in 1950 and wrote about West Indian migrants arriving in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. The Lonely Londoners is narrated in a Trinidadian-inflected English, and follows Moses Aloetta and the newcomers who pass through his room.
His first novel, A Brighter Sun (1952), is set in Trinidad. Moses returns in Moses Ascending (1975). He is often described as the writer who gave voice to the Windrush generation, and his books suit readers who like comedy with an undertow of loneliness.
Read Selvon if you want the voice of the Windrush generation in London.
Start with The Lonely Londoners (1956). Caribbean migrants try to make a life in a cold, indifferent London in the 1950s, told in loose episodes. Or A Brighter Sun (1952). A young Indo-Trinidadian couple start married life in a village outside Port of Spain during the Second World War.
Derek Walcott
1930–2017 · Castries, Saint Lucia
Walcott was a poet and playwright from Saint Lucia whose work sets Caribbean landscapes, speech and history alongside the European classics he grew up on. In a Green Night (1962) established him, and the autobiographical long poem Another Life (1973) traces his formation as an artist.
Omeros (1990) retells Homeric themes among Saint Lucian fishermen. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. His play Dream on Monkey Mountain is also widely read and staged.
Read Walcott if you want poetry that puts the Caribbean at the centre of the epic tradition.
Start with Omeros (1990). A book-length poem in which Saint Lucian fishermen named Achille and Hector echo Homer’s heroes. Or Another Life (1973). An autobiographical long poem about growing up in Castries and becoming a painter and poet.
All Derek Walcott books →V.S. Naipaul
1932–2018 · Chaguanas, Trinidad
Naipaul was born into an Indo-Trinidadian family in Chaguanas and spent most of his adult life in England. His early books are comic portraits of Trinidad, including The Mystic Masseur (1957) and Miguel Street; his later fiction and travel writing turned to post-colonial societies in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.
He won the Booker Prize in 1971 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. His views on formerly colonised countries were sharply contested, and his work suits readers prepared to argue with an author.
Read Naipaul if you want a large, funny and sad family novel set in Trinidad.
Start with A House for Mr Biswas (1961). Mohun Biswas, an Indo-Trinidadian journalist, spends his life trying to own a house of his own and escape his wife’s overbearing family. Or A Bend in the River (1979). A trader from the East African coast sets up shop in a town in a newly independent central African country.
Maryse Condé
1934–2024 · Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe
Condé wrote in French about the African diaspora across centuries and continents. Ségou (Segu, 1987 in Barbara Bray’s translation) is a historical saga of the Bambara kingdom; Traversée de la mangrove (Crossing the Mangrove) is set at a wake in a Guadeloupe village. Most of her novels were translated by her husband, Richard Philcox.
She received the New Academy Prize in Literature in 2018, awarded in the year the Nobel was postponed, and The Gospel According to the New World was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023.
Read Condé if you want historical fiction that crosses Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas.
Start with I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1986). Moi, Tituba, sorcière… noire de Salem: the enslaved Barbadian woman accused in the Salem witch trials tells her own story; translated by Richard Philcox (1992). Or Crossing the Mangrove (1989). Traversée de la mangrove: villagers at the wake of a mysterious outsider each reveal what he meant to them; translated by Richard Philcox (1995).
Reinaldo Arenas
1943–1990 · Aguas Claras, Holguín, Cuba
Arenas was a Cuban novelist who was persecuted under Castro as a gay writer and dissident. He later settled in the United States and died in New York in 1990. His second novel, El mundo alucinante (1966), reimagines the life of a rebellious Mexican friar.
His five-novel cycle, the Pentagonía, beginning with Celestino antes del alba (1967; in English Singing from the Well), forms a ‘secret history’ of post-revolutionary Cuba. His memoir, written in exile, is his most widely read book.
Read Arenas if you want a fierce memoir about freedom and repression.
Start with Before Night Falls (1992). Antes que anochezca: a memoir of a rural childhood, sexual freedom and imprisonment in revolutionary Cuba, translated by Dolores M. Koch (1993). Or Singing from the Well (1967). Celestino antes del alba: a poor rural boy and his imagined cousin, first part of the Pentagonía.
Jamaica Kincaid
Born 1949 · St John’s, Antigua
Kincaid was born Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson in St John’s, Antigua, and writes in a precise, incantatory English about mothers and daughters, colonial education and leaving home. Annie John (1985) and Lucy (1990) follow a girl growing up in Antigua and a young woman working as an au pair in the United States.
A Small Place (1988) is a short, angry essay on tourism and the legacy of colonial rule in Antigua. The Autobiography of My Mother (1996) won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and See Now Then won an American Book Award.
Read Kincaid if you like short books with a distinctive, intense voice.
Start with Annie John (1985). A girl’s close bond with her mother sours as she grows up in Antigua, until she leaves the island at seventeen. Or A Small Place (1988). An essay addressed to the tourist visiting Antigua, on corruption, colonialism and what visitors don’t see.
Patrick Chamoiseau
Born 1953 · Fort-de-France, Martinique
Chamoiseau writes in a French shot through with Martinican Creole. With Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant he wrote Éloge de la créolité (1989), the manifesto of the créolité movement, which argued for a Caribbean identity built from mixture rather than a single origin.
Texaco won the Prix Goncourt in 1992. In English it was translated by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov (1997), who also translated Solibo Magnificent; Linda Coverdale translated Slave Old Man (2018).
Read Chamoiseau if you want an epic of the Caribbean city in a playful, oral style.
Start with Texaco (1992). An old woman tells the history of her shantytown on the edge of Fort-de-France, and of Martinique from slavery to the present. Or Slave Old Man (1997). L’esclave vieil homme et le molosse: an elderly enslaved man escapes a plantation into the forest, pursued by a hunting dog; English translation by Linda Coverdale, 2018.
Edwidge Danticat
Born 1969 · Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince and joined her parents in New York as a child. Writing in English, she tells stories of Haitian families divided between Haiti and the United States, of dictatorship and of survival. Her debut, Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), follows a girl who leaves her aunt in Haiti to join her mother in New York.
The Farming of Bones (1998) won an American Book Award. Her memoir Brother, I’m Dying and her story collection Everything Inside both won National Book Critics Circle Awards, and she received the Neustadt International Prize in 2018.
Read Danticat if you want Haitian history and migration told through families.
Start with Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994). Sophie leaves her aunt in rural Haiti to join a mother she barely knows in New York, and has to face what happened to her mother. Or The Farming of Bones (1998). A Haitian woman working in the Dominican Republic lives through the 1937 massacre of Haitians ordered by Trujillo.
All Edwidge Danticat books →Marlon James
Born 1970 · Kingston, Jamaica
James’s first novels are set in Jamaica: John Crow’s Devil (2005), about a village torn between two preachers, and The Book of Night Women (2009), about a slave revolt on an eighteenth-century sugar plantation. They are violent, voice-driven books.
A Brief History of Seven Killings won the Man Booker Prize in 2015. He then turned to African-inspired fantasy with Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019) and Moon Witch, Spider King (2022).
Read James if you want a big, polyphonic, demanding novel of modern Jamaica.
Start with A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014). A chorus of narrators circles the 1976 attempt on Bob Marley’s life and its aftermath in Kingston and New York. Or The Book of Night Women (2009). Lilith, born into slavery on a Jamaican plantation, is drawn into a group of women planning a revolt.
Which Caribbean author should you read first?
The best starting point depends on what you want from a book.
- For a short classic — Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
- For poetry — Derek Walcott, Omeros (1990)
- For London and migration — Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956)
- For French Caribbean fiction — Maryse Condé, I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1986)
- For a memoir — Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls (1992)
- For a recent prize-winner — Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014)
Where to go next
Frequently asked questions
Which Caribbean authors have won the Nobel Prize?
On this list, Derek Walcott of Saint Lucia in 1992 and V.S. Naipaul of Trinidad in 2001; the poet Saint-John Perse, who won in 1960, was born in Guadeloupe. Maryse Condé of Guadeloupe received the New Academy Prize, awarded in 2018 when the Nobel was postponed.
What is the best Caribbean novel to start with?
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys is short and widely taught. For a contemporary novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat is accessible and moving.
Which French Caribbean writers are available in English?
Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé and Patrick Chamoiseau are all translated. Condé’s novels were mostly translated by Richard Philcox, and Chamoiseau’s Texaco, winner of the 1992 Prix Goncourt, by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov.
Which Spanish-speaking Caribbean writers should I read?
Alejo Carpentier and Reinaldo Arenas from Cuba are good starting points: Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World for the Haitian Revolution, Arenas’s memoir Before Night Falls for life under Castro.
What is négritude?
A literary and political movement launched in Paris in the 1930s by Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas to affirm Black identity and culture against colonial racism. Césaire coined the word.
Which Caribbean novel won the Booker Prize?
Marlon James won in 2015 with A Brief History of Seven Killings. V.S. Naipaul also won the Booker, in 1971.
Start with the author whose questions interest you most. The book you remember longest may not be the one with the clearest answers, but the one that changes how you see something familiar.
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