Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Margaret Cezair-Thompson was born in Jamaica, West Indies; she attended St Andrews High School for
Girls, a long-established government-subsidized school that has produced many of
Jamaican's most prominent women. She also spent a year at a Roman Catholic
boarding school in the countryside called Servite Convent of the Assumption
School for Girls—which was a bit like the school she describes Ida as attending
in The Pirate's Daughter. She was expelled after a year and
returned happily to St Andrews.
She came of age as Jamaica emerged from being a British colony to being an
independent nation. She left Jamaica at nineteen years old to attend Barnard
College in New York where she received a B.A. in English. She received her
Ph.D. in English from the City University of New York with a dissertation on V.S.
Naipaul. Since 1990, she has taught literature and creative writing at Wellesley College.
Her son was born in 1999, the same year that her first book, The True History of Paradise, was published.
She's also published short fiction, essays, reviews, and interviews in various
magazines. Her first screenplay, Photo Finish, about a
Jamaican-American athlete, was sold to Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions in 1994
(now Harpo-Disney). The True History of Paradise was selected as one of
six finalists for the Dublin International IMPAC Award.
Her interests include movies, Victorian and Modern British fiction and poetry,
Caribbean and British colonial history, postcolonial literature and film
(especially related to the Caribbean and Africa), and Jamaican music. The
authors she returns to again and again are Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Thomas
Hardy, Paule Marshall, Ben Okri, Jean Rhys, William Shakespeare (especially the
tragedies), Joyce’s Dubliners, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair,
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and the King James
Bible.
She currently lives in Massachusetts.
Margaret Cezair-Thompson's website
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Why did you want to write about Errol Flynn?
It wasn't so much that I wanted to write about Errol Flynn but rather that once I came upon the setting and early images, he presented himself as a person who had been there at that time. Then a number of things fell into place in my mind: stories I'd heard about him when I was growing up in Jamaica, all that he symbolized, and the challenge of recreating him, not only as Hollywood icon but as a human with human weaknesses and hopes.
How did you research Flynn’s life? What sources did you use?
I read one or two books about him and also his own autobiography. I spoke to people who had known him and/or who remembered the time he lived in Jamaica. I watched his films countless times including the film he made that was set partly in Jamaica (Cruise of the Zaca).
What do you make of Errol Flynn? In your opinion, what sort of person do you imagine he was?
It will sound strange but I feel like I’ve gotten to know him, that I’ve lived close to him these past few years. My son has, in a sense, grown up with Errol Flynn in our home – his pictures, his movies – pirates, sea captains, Robin Hood. What I’ve come to know is a man who made mistakes, who ...
Austin Clarke was a professor of literature and taught at Yale, Brandeis, Williams, Duke, and the Universities of Texas and Indiana. He assisted in setting up a Black Studies program at Yale in 1968, after which he became the... (more)
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