Excerpt from Peepal Tree site
- Jan Lowe Shinebourne (nee Lowe) was born in Guyana, and educated at Berbice High School. She comes from the same area of Guyana as her near contemporaries, Cyril Dabydeen and Arnold Itwaru. After school she was a reporter in the city, Georgetown, then a student at the University of Guyana between 1968-1970. She began writing in the mid 1960s and in 1974 she was a prize-winner in the National History and Arts Council Literary Competition.
In 1970 she moved to London where she still lives. She did postgraduate literary studies at the University of London. In addition to her work as an author, she has also worked in London as an editor for several journals, as a political and cultural activist and as a college and university lecturer. She has done reading tours in North America, Europe, the Caribbean and Asia, and was a Visiting Fellow at New York University. Read full bio at Peepal Tress Press website
Books
- \"Timepiece\"
- Sandra Yansen must leave behind the close ties of family and village when she goes away to take up a job as a reporter in Georgetown. When she says goodbye to her friends T and Estelle in her Berbice village, portrayed with a sensuous sensitivity to the mysteries of place, she feels that leaving Pheasant is a betrayal and is confused about where she stands in the quarrel between her mother Helen, who is pro-town and her father, Ben, who is deeply attached to the country and its values.
Unfolding within a framework of two tumultuous weeks, this novel tells of the struggle for autonomy both a young woman and a repressed country face. Interweaving the young woman's gradual growth to consciousness with the death of the British plantation system, this story portrays the demise of an economic and political system paralleling the development of an individual. While presenting Caribbean politics in an understandable way, this tale also includes insight into Afro-Indian relations, traditional healing practices, and family relationships.
Covering more than four decades in the lives of Guyanese at home or in Britain and Canada, these stories have an intensive and rewarding inner focus on a character at a point of crisis. Harold is celebrating the victory of the political party he supports whilst confronting a sense of his own powerlessness; Jacob has been sent back to Guyana from Britain after suffering a mental breakdown; Chuni, a worker at the university, is confused by the climate of revolutionary sloganizing which masks the true situation: the rise of a new middle class, elevated by their loyalty to the ruling party. This class, as the maid, Vera, recognises, are simply the old masters with new Black faces.
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