Biography

Dr Forbes is Professor of Caribbean Literature in the Department of English. Her research interests include Caribbean literary and cultural history, Caribbean poetics, and diaspora and modernity studies. Dr Forbes’ many essays have appeared in edited book collections as well as leading Caribbean and postcolonial journals such as Small Axe, Caribbean Quarterly, Journal of West Indian Literature, Anthurium, Literature and Psychology, Ariel and Postcolonial Text. She is the author of the award-winning book From Nation to Diaspora: Samuel Selvon, George Lamming and the Cultural Performance of Gender (University of the West Indies Press, 2005) and co-editor of Caribbean Literature in Transition 1920-1970, volume 2 of the three-volume series published by Cambridge University Press (2021). Dr Forbes serves on the editorial teams of peer-reviewed journals. In her career as a fiction writer,, she has authored several books  including Songs of Silence (Heinemann 2002, 2010; Hodder Caribbean Contemporary Classics 2021)  and A Tall History of Sugar (Akashic Books 2019, Canongate 2020),winner of the 2020 Hurston/Wright Award for Fiction. Her short fiction is anthologized in Jamaica Journal, BIM, The Missing Slate, Stranger's Guide and the book collection Survivor (Walker Books 2003).