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Diana McCaulay is an award winning Jamaican writer and a lifelong resident of its capital city Kingston. She has written five novels - Dog-Heart (March 2010), Huracan (July 2012), both published by Peepal Tree Press in the United Kingdom, Gone to Drift (February 2016), published by Papillote Press from Dominica and the UK and Harper Collins US, the self-published, White Liver Gal (May 2017) and her new release, Daylight Come, published by Peepal Tree Press in September 2020. Diana’s novels entice readers with the unique spirit and complexity of contemporary Jamaica.
Daylight Come is a climate crisis novel set in 2084 when it has become too hot to go outside in the day, causing a teenaged girl and her mother to seek higher ground and cooler temperatures, facing many dangers along the way.
Dog-Heart is a compelling and dramatic story of one woman’s attempt to make a difference in the life of a young man from a disadvantaged community in Kingston. Huracan, in turn, is loosely based on Diana’s own family history-- part contemporary and part historical novel. Huracan tells the compelling story of Leigh McCaulay, who is returning to Jamaica after 15 years in the US to make a home on the island. Although Huracan is not a sequel to Dog-Heart, Huracan does explain the origins of the ghetto in Diana's first novel and the nature of white guilt explored in her second novel.
Ian Thomson, author of The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica, described Huracan as follows: “Diana McCaulay has captured the bright tropic warmth, the violence and beauty of her birthplace like a born storyteller”.
Dog-Heart won a Gold Medal in the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission’s National Creative Writing Awards (2008), was shortlisted for the Guyana Prize (2011), the IMPAC Dublin Award (2012) and the Saroyan Prize for International Writing (2012). Huracan was also shortlisted for the Saroyan Prize for International Writing in 2014. Gone to Drift placed second in CODE's Burt Prize for Caribbean Literature in 2015 and won the Vic Reid Prize for Young Adult fiction in Jamaica’s Lignum Vitae Awards in 2016.
Diana's third novel, Gone to Drift, her first for young adults, tells the story of a boy’s search for his grandfather who is lost at sea. The novel explores fundamental choices facing Jamaican society and many developing countries: the casting away of traditional knowledge in the embracing of fast changing modernity; the challenges of surviving in an economy mired in debt and unemployment; and the pressures of an unequal society that forces people into daily acts of compromise and corruption.
White Liver Gal explores the traumatic legacies of sexual abuse over generations and the redemptive power of friendship between women.
Diana founded the Jamaica Environment Trust (JET) in 1991 and still serves as its Board Chair. In that position, she has interacted with all levels of Jamaican society from the Prime Minister and cabinet officials to rural Jamaicans displaced by development and fishers denied access to beaches. Diana’s writing contains an authenticity and vibrancy derived from her active participation at so many levels of Jamaican society. She was a popular newspaper columnist for The Gleaner (1994-2001) and her short fiction has been published by Granta Online, Adda Stories, Eleven Eleven, The Caribbean Writer, Afro-Beat, Lifestyle Magazine and the Jamaica Observer’s literary supplement, Bookends. She won the regional Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2012, for her short story, The Dolphin Catchers. Her story, Picking Crabs in Negril, was shortlisted for the V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize in 2019.
Diana was born into the Jamaican upper-middle class and has spent a lifetime pondering questions of race, class, colour, and privilege in Jamaican society. The honest and penetrating insights in her novels and stories come from sharp observation and profound self-reflection, and arise out of experiences similar to the ones she has written about. Hers is a uniquely authentic voice from a background which usually turns away from all that she unflinchingly faces.
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