Olive Senior was born and brought up in Jamaica and educated in Jamaica and Canada. She is a graduate of Montego Bay High School and Carleton University, Ottawa.
She started her career as a journalist with the Daily Gleaner and later entered the world of publishing. She was editor of two of the Caribbean’s leading journals – Social and Economic Studies at the University of the West Indies and Jamaica Journal, published by Institute of Jamaica Publications of which she was also Managing Director. She left Jamaica in 1989, spent some years in Europe and since 1993 has been based in Toronto.
Olive Senior has worked internationally as a creative writing teacher and lecturer on Caribbean literature and culture. She is on the faculty of the Humber School for Writers, Toronto and has taught in the writing programmes at University of Toronto, St Lawrence University, and Barnard College, Columbia University, New York. She has also led writing workshops at the University of Miami, the University of the West Indies, and in the Bahamas, Bermuda, the USA, UK and France and other places.
She has been Writer-in-residence at the University of Adelaide, Australia, in Canada at the University of Alberta and Banff International Writing Studio, at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica and Trinidad. She has been an Arts Council of England Visiting International Writer, a Hawthornden Fellow in Scotland, and Dana Distinguished International Writer at St Lawrence University.