Born in Sussex, England, "of mixed Indian, African, Scottish, and Amerindian descent", Oonya Kempadoo was brought up in Guyana from the age of five.
[4][5] Kempadoo began writing seriously in 1997[3] and her first novel, Buxton Spice, a semi-autobiographical rural coming-of-age story,[2] was published 1998.
[6] Her second book, Tide Running (Picador, 2001), set in Plymouth, Tobago, is the story of young brothers Cliff and Ossie.
[7] Tide Running won the Casa de las Americas Literary Prize for best English or Creole novel.
[10] Her third novel All Decent Animals (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013) was recommended on Oprah's 2013 Summer Reading List by Karen Russell, who said: "How am I only now finding out about this writer?