Nalo Hopkinson

Nalo Hopkinson is a Jamaican speculative fiction writer and editor. She currently lives and teaches in Riverside, California. Her novels and short stories such as those in her collection Skin Folk often draw on Caribbean history and language, and its traditions of oral and written storytelling.

Nalo Hopkinson was bornDecember 1960 in Kingston, Jamaica, to Freda and Muhammed AbdurRahman Slade Hopkinson. She grew up in Guyana, Trinidad, and Canada. She was raised in a literary environment her mother was a library technician and her father a Guyanese poet, playwright and actor who also taught English and Latin. By virtue of this upbringing, Hopkinson had access to writers like Derek Walcott during her formative years, and could read Kurt Vonneguts works by the age of six. Hopkinsons writing is influenced by the fairy and folk tales she read at a young age, which included AfroCaribbean stories like Anansi, as well as Western works like Gullivers Travels, the Iliad, the Odyssey she was also known to have read the works of Shakespeare around the time she was reading Homer. Though she lived in Connecticut briefly during her fathers tenure at Yale University, Hopkinson has said that the culture shock from her move to Toronto from Guyana at the age ofwas something to which st

Source: Wikipedia