Hopkinson, Nalo (1960– )
Nalo Hopkinson was born in Kingston, Jamaica,
on December 20, 1960. Her father, a journal-
ist, teacher, actor, and poet-playwright, and her
mother, a library technician, belonged to a Carib-
bean arts group. The family lived in the Caribbean
(Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana). For a time the fam-
ily also lived in the United States, while her father
attended Yale, until they moved to Toronto in
- Hopkinson graduated from the University
of York in 1982 with combined honors in Rus-
sian and French; she received her M.A. in writing
popular fiction in 2002 from Seton Hill College in
Pennsylvania.
Hopkinson, a science fiction author, began
to write and publish in 1993, the year her father
passed away. Like that of her literary foremother,
OCTAVIA BUTLER, Hopkinson’s vision is a strong,
feminist one that subverts the speculative fic-
tion genre, which, as Hopkinson puts it, “speaks
so much about the experience of being alienated,
but contains so little written by alienated peoples
themselves.” Suddenly becoming the member of a
minority in Canada resulted in an awareness of life
on the margins that often appears in Hopkinson’s
writing. Hopkinson also conveys a strong sense of
the uniqueness of people and place through set-
ting, Jamaican and Trinidadian creole, and Carib-
bean myth, folklore, and literature.
Taking her title from a Caribbean singing
game, Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring (1998)
won Warner Aspect’s First Novel Competition, the
Locus Award for Best First Novel, and the John W.
Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Rich with
Afro-Caribbean culture and language, this dysto-
pia is set in the near future in Toronto. The rich
have fled, leaving the poor to a dangerous preda-
tory environment in which old ways—farming,
barter, and folk medicine—become essential for
survival. When Ontario’s premier needs a trans-
plant and a boost in her approval ratings, the
protagonist’s drug-addicted boyfriend is enlisted
to find a human heart. The young new mother,
Ti-Jeanne, convinces her grandmother, a Voudoun
priestess, to help. Caught up in a battle to the
death, Ti-Jeanne discovers her own power as she
comes to understand the ancient spirits.
Hopkinson’s second novel, Midnight Robber
(2000), another coming-of-age story, was a New
York Times Notable Book of the Year; it received
honorable mention for the Casa de las Americas
Prize. Initially set during Carnival on a Caribbean-
settled planet, the young protagonist accompanies
her corrupt father into exile in a brutal parallel
existence. Incest and murder force her into yet
another layer of banishment where folkloric pre-
decessors and her own nonhierarchic and postco-
lonial sensibility allow her to survive and begin to
carve out a new social order. Technologies of Afri-
can diasporic culture in this novel include commu-
nication devices known as “four-eyes” (a Jamaican
word for “seers”) and home operating systems
called “eshus,” from the omnipresent, omniscient
West African trickster deity Eshu Elegbara.
In her novel The Salt Roads (2003), Hopkinson
explores women’s relationships with lovers, each
other, the community, and the divine. When three
Caribbean slave women gather one night to bury
a stillborn baby, their collective mourning calls
up the deity Ezili, the Afro-Caribbean goddess of
sex and love. The spirit goes on to make a global
journey, inhabiting the minds of living women
through history.
Hopkinson has two short fiction collections.
Caribbean lore informs most of the tales in Skin
Folk (2001), which won the World Fantasy Award
for Best Collection and the Sunburst Award for
Canadian Literature of the Fantastic and was a
New York Times Notable Book of the Year. While
some of the stories celebrate life, others are more
ominous. In “Greedy Choke Puppy,” a woman dis-
cards her skin at night and kills children for their
life force. In Mojo: Conjure Stories (2003), super-
natural powers obtain justice for Africans in the
diaspora. Mojo, a West African term for a cloth bag
with magical contents, today refers to magic itself
and the powerful inheritance of African cultures.
Hopkinson’s work in drama includes a radio
play, Indicator Species (CBC Radio, 2000) and
three monologues. She has taught creative writing
and science fiction literature courses in Toronto
and elsewhere, including a stint as writer-in-
residence at Seattle’s Clarion West. Antholo-
gies edited by Hopkinson include Whispers from254 Hopkinson, Nalo