Careless whispers and broken records: how we lost mid-century Caribbean women writers

Each year, the Friends of Senate House Library host the Holden Lecture, which focuses on one of the Library’s unique scholarly collections. 

For the 2024 Holden Lecture, Professor Alison Donnell will consider how, in the age of V.S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott, women writers became the lost voices of the Caribbean.

The event is free to attend, but places are limited and must be booked in advance. 

Register for the event 
 

About the speaker

Alison Donnell is Head of the School of Humanities and Professor of Modern Literatures in English at the University of Bristol. She has published widely on Anglophone Caribbean literature, with significant contributions to the fields of literary history and culture, recovery research of women authors, and Caribbean literary archives. 

She was Principal Investigator of the Leverhulme Trust funded Caribbean Literary Heritage project, which has produced an open access digital resource www.caribbeanliteraryheritage.com, and General Editor of Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800-2020 (3 volumes)  published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. She also works on Caribbean gender and queer studies.

Her latest monograph Creolized Sexualities: Undoing Heteronormativity in the literary imagination of the Anglo-Caribbean was published in Rutgers’ Critical Caribbean Series in 2022. An A-Z of Neglected Writers of the English-speaking Caribbean will be published by Papillote Press in 2025.

Professor Donnell delivered the National Library of Jamaica’s Annual Distinguished Lecture, on Animating the Archives of Una Marson in 2016, the 15th Annual Edward Baugh lecture at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, on ‘The Missing Mid-Century West Indian Woman Writer and another quarrel with history’ in 2022, and the University of Guyana’s Edgar Mittelholzer Memorial Lecture of 2024 on ‘Recovering Edwina Melville’.