Fantastic Alternatives: Journeys into the Imagination: A Conversation with Nalo Hopkinson

Abstract

Nalo Hopkinson was born in 1960 in Kingston, Jamaica, and grew up in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Guyana. In 1977, her family moved to Toronto, Canada, where she still lives. Since capturing the attention of the literary world with die publication of her award-winning first novel Brown Girl in the Ring (Warner Books, 1998), Hopkinson has been writing to international critical acclaim; she is certainly one of the most impressively original authors to emerge on the international literary scene in recent years. Hopkinson is one of a handful of authors from the anglophone Caribbean who write what is known as genre speculative fiction. Through her first two novels, Brown Girl in the Ring and Midnight Robber (Warner Books, 2000), she has brought a Caribbean flavour to science fiction and fantasy. Many of her short stories, available in a collection titled Skin Folk (Warner Books, 2001), are a rich blend of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and realism. Fairy-tales and Caribbean folklore enrich narratives featuring sharply etched characters whose experiences offer insights into problems of gender, racial and sexual identity, culture, and community. A literary innovator in many ways, Hopkinson is doing in science fiction and fantasy what literary pio neers such as Samuel Selvon accomplished in earlier Caribbean writing: creating a uniquely Caribbean voice and language in fiction that celebrates both the particularity and the universality of Caribbean experience. In a relatively short writing career, Hopkinson has racked up an