OLIVE SENIOR is the award-winning author of twenty books of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children's literature. She was the Poet Laureate of Jamaica from 2021 to 2024, and has received numerous awards and honors, including honorary doctorates from the University of the West Indies (Jamaica) and York University (Canada), the Gold Medal of the Institute of Jamaica, Canada's Matt Cohen Award for Lifetime Achievement, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Senior's work is widely translated, and is taught in schools and other institutions worldwide; her writing is also the subject of numerous critical essays. She splits her time between Toronto, Canada and Kingston, Jamaica. Paradise Once is her latest novel.