Writer and Poet
Olive Senior is the award-winning author of 18 books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and children’s literature and other published work. Her many awards include Canada’s Writers Trust Matt Cohen Award for Lifetime Achievement, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies and the Gold Medal of the Institute of Jamaica. Her work has been taught internationally and is widely translated. Olive Senior is from Jamaica and lives in Toronto, Canada, but returns frequently to the Caribbean which remains central to her work.
Alphabet poems derived from the language of Covid-19
T for Touch
Though ‘skin hunger’ is real,
we are told,
the need for touch biological,
hard-wired in us, how long after
we leave lockdown will the fear of contagion
keep us starving ourselves
of touch?