Paradise Once
Olive Senior
November 8, 2025
The Lynx Books (601 South Main Street)
6 PM
Join us for an evening of lively and compelling conversation between Olive Senior and Jean D’Costa as they discuss Senior’s latest novel, Paradise Once.
About Paradise Once
Paradise Once (Akashic 2025) is a sweeping historical novel that brings to life the resiliency of the indigenous Taíno people of the Caribbean, whose culture was virtually destroyed within two generations of their “discovery” by Christopher Columbus in 1492. In 1513 in Cuba, an entire village is wiped out by Spanish forces for no discernible reason. Had the villagers offended their spiritual guides—the cemíes—as one faction claimed, by incorporating foreign practices?
Four youthful survivors escape the massacre—three indigenous and one African runaway. They start off on separate perilous paths, not knowing they have been chosen by the cemíes to carry out a sacred mission—to ensure the survival of a Sacred Bundle that will enable a Taíno revival in future generations. But first, an epic spiritual battle must be played out.
In this love song to the Caribbean, Olive Senior authentically evokes the physical and spiritual worlds of its First Peoples and the survivors—indigenous and African—who will become the resistance fighters known in history as Cimarrones or Maroons.
About the Speakers
Olive Senior
Olive Senior is the award-winning author of twenty books of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children’s literature. She was the Poet Laureate of Jamaica from 2021 to 2024, and has received numerous awards and honors, including honorary doctorates from the University of the West Indies (Jamaica) and York University (Canada), the Gold Medal of the Institute of Jamaica, Canada’s Matt Cohen Award for Lifetime Achievement, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Senior’s work is widely translated and is taught in schools and other institutions worldwide; her writing is also the subject of numerous critical essays. She splits her time between Toronto, Canada and Kingston, Jamaica. Paradise Once is her latest novel.
JeanD’Costa
Devoted to the study of language as a complex cultural process, Jean D’Costa has worked from 1962 on aspects of English and of Jamaican Creole, revising aspects of the curriculum in English at the UWI, and collaborating with educators to expand and enrich the Jamaican school curriculum. She has published three well-received novels for her primary audience, Jamaicans between the ages of ten and thirteen: Sprat Morrison (1972); Escape to Last Man Peak (1975), and Voice in the Wind (1978). As well as three short tales for age-group seven to nine, D’Costa has published critical material on such writers as Roger Mais, and with Barbara Lalla has co-authored Voices in Exile (1989) and Language in Exile (1990) on the origins of Jamaican Creole, as well as a third collection on the cultural significance of Caribbean Creoles with Barbara Lalla and the late Velma Pollard.
Escape to Last Man Peak is being made into a movie (Tanya Batson-Savage, Analisa Chapman, and Nile Saulter) as testament to the lasting impact of this novel on D’Costa’s primary audience of Jamaican youngsters. In 1994 the Institute of Jamaica awarded D’Costa the Jamaica Silver Musgrave Medal in recognition of her work.
This event is free and open to the public.
“Paradise Once” is presented by The Lynx Books and co-sponsored by Imagining Climate Change, the George A. Smathers Libraries Special and Area Studies Collections, and the UF Department of English. The event is part of “The Revolutionary Power of Storytelling: Children’s Literature,” a two-day symposium (Nov. 7–8) organized by the George A. Smathers Libraries Special and Area Studies Collections. See this page for a complete schedule of symposium events.