Book cover for Lost and Found, An A-Z of Neglected Writers of the Anglophone Caribbean

Lost and Found

£15.99

ISBN

9781739130312

Published

May 2025

Format

Paperback

Lost and Found makes a major contribution to providing a fuller picture of the Caribbean’s rich literary history. It both restores our knowledge of writers whose lives and work have slipped out of view while heralding others whose work has never been properly recognised. Offering a fascinating insight into the lives and writings of these ‘lost’ writers, this A-Z also provides future researchers with a comprehensive bibliography of their forgotten works.

An inspiring reclaiming of writers, especially women, from Antigua, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad: those who were in the wrong place at the wrong time; those disregarded by the establishment; those whose personal or professional lives stole their writing lives; those who suffered discrimination; those who wrote about the “wrong” things. All are celebrated in this meticulously researched and compiled book.

What they say

“This is a fascinating groundbreaking and essential rewriting of literary history to include outstanding writers who fell from sight but whose works deserve to be better known.”

– Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize Winner, 2019

“Seldom does academic work transform a landscape. Alison Donnell has resuscitated and reformed the mostly male-dominated Caribbean canon to show that women were very much part of the Golden Age of Caribbean literature. It needs to be widely read.”

– Monique Roffey, Winner of Costa Book of the year 2020

“Lost and Found challenges our most deeply held literary myth: that West Indian literature spontaneously arose mid-century when a few gifted men, justly celebrated, burst onto the metropolitan literary scene. It offers acute insight into the politics of how literary recognition might be gained – or lost.”

–Olive Senior, Author and Poet Laureate of Jamaica, 2021-2024

“An astonishment and a revelation: of all that has been written and all that was, until now, in danger of being irrevocably lost. Extremely well written, informative and insightful, Lost and Found is literary and biographical excavation at its best.”

– Jacqueline Bishop, Award-Winning Writer and Visual Artist

About the Author

Alison Donnell

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