Hazel D. Campbell

(1940 - 2018)

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1940, Hazel D. Campbell published the short-story collections The Rag Doll, Woman’s Tongue, and Singerman before turning her attention to writing children’s books. Jamaica on My Mind, a collection spanning fifty years of short stories, was published in 2019, six months after her death at the age of seventy-eight. “I get the sense,” wrote the Jamaican author Jacqueline Bishop, “that she is the all-seeing eye and the all-listening ear, roving over the island, stopping here and there to listen to our conversations.” Campbell once wrote that despite having to read books from elsewhere in school, she was always encouraged to think Jamaican. “Perhaps that’s why I never migrated and why my work reflects almost a ‘romantic’ view of Jamaica—its people, landscape, and the very peculiar aura which makes it difficult to understand; difficult to live in; but, nevertheless, such an enchanting country.”