JWIL mourns the passing of Guyanese writer, Jan Lowe Shinebourne (1947-2026), author of four novels––Timepiece (1986); The Last English Plantation (1988); Chinese Women (2010); The Last Ship (2015)––and a book of short stories, The Godmother and Other Stories (2004). Born in Rose Hall, Berbice, Guyana, Shinebourne attended the University of Guyana as an undergraduate before migrating to the UK in 1970 where she continued her writing career. Her literary works were mostly set in the land of her birth and traces with particular care and insight the multiethnic landscape of Guyana. Time Piece was the winner of the 1987 Guyana Prize for Literature for best first novel and Shinebourne was the first woman writer to win that prize. She was part of an early, fertile network of writing and publishing within the region. In a 2013 interview with Petamber Persaud, she describes sending extracts of her first novel to the Trinidad and Tobago Review, which was being edited by Ken Ramchand. She also situated herself with a landscape of local writing in Guyana specifically, describing publishing her early short stories in Expressions, a magazine started by teachers at Queens College and St. Stanislaus. In that interview and elsewhere, Shinebourne highlights her active role in the context of a field of Guyanese creative writers and scholars including Victor Ramraj, John Rickford, Brian Chan, Brian Cotton, John Agard, Mark McWatt, ND Williams, Milton Drepaul, Terrence Roberts, and others. She notes the pressures of nationalism on creative expression for writers in that time, in particular the edict to write about the local and in Creole.
As news circulated about Shinebourne’s passing, Caribbean writers shared their memories of her supportive and generative presence in the many global sites where Caribbean literature and cultural community travels and flourishes. Shinebourne’s life as a cultural and political activist is an important part of her story and the story of the solidarities and alliances formed as a result of encounters and crossings in Caribbean diasporic places. She describes her political consciousness as being influenced by John La Rose and the New Beacon Bookshop in London and the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books in the UK that La Rose established and staged from 1982-1995.
Shinebourne was particularly noteworthy for being an early forerunner in tracing the histories and gendered experiences of the Chinese in the region, but her writing also illuminated the imbrications of the lives and shared experiences of the various ethnic groups that make up Guyana. These intimacies were part of her own experiences growing up in Berbice with the Rose Hall sugar estate looming large. Born as she was of two cross-pollinated strands of the indentureship diaspora in the form of a Hindi-speaking Chinese father and a Lutheran Indian mother, Jeremy Poynting argues that Shinebourne “always understood very clearly her essential Guyaneseness, the contradiction that she had grown up within, that in a society that in the early 1960s broke down in bitter racial conflict between Africans and Indians, the truth was that so many Guyanese lived in a state of cultural heterogeneity.” Her work remains deeply influential for continuing generations of Caribbean scholars and writers.
https://www.peepaltreepress.com/authors/jan-lowe-shinebourne
Shinebourne in conversation with Petamber Persaud on his program Oral Tradition https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm73lhWKEaY
See here for the reflections of Poynting whose press Peepal Tree published all of Shinebourne’s books.
See here for Shinebourne’s reflections on how much Rose Hall influenced her writing and thinking.
