John Hearne (writer) - Misplaced Pages

Jamaican novelist, journalist and teacher. (1926–1994)

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John Hearne
Born	John Edgar Colwell Hearne 4 February 1926 Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Died	12 December 1994(1994-12-12) (aged 68)
Other names	Jay Monroe; John Morris
Alma mater	Edinburgh University
Occupation(s)	Novelist, journalist and teacher

John Edgar Colwell Hearne (4 February 1926 – 12 December 1994) was a Jamaican novelist, journalist, and teacher.

Biography

Hearne was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, of Jamaican parents and attended Jamaica College in Kingston. After serving in the RAF during the Second World War, he read English and Philosophy at Edinburgh University. He trained as a teacher at London University and from 1950 to 1952 taught in a Jamaican school. He also worked as a journalist.

He then travelled in Europe for some years (part of the time with novelist Roger Mais), before returning to Jamaica in 1957. Hearne returned to the UK in the summer of 1958 and taught English at Midhurst Grammar School before working in journalism into 1960. He was subsequently on the staff of the Extra-Mural Department of the University of the West Indies, Mona.

Writing

Hearne's first published work was the novel Voices under the Window, issued in 1955. Set in Jamaica in the late 1940s or early 1950s, it uses the framing device of a progressive politician's injury and death in a riot to narrate the story of a man who, born into racial and economic privilege, decided to cast his lot with the underprivileged. Hearne won the 1956 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize – awarded for the best novel written by a British Commonwealth author aged under 30 – for Voices Under the Window, making him the first Caribbean author to win a major British literary prize.

Hearne followed this with four novels written between 1956 and 1961 – The Faces of Love, Stranger at the Gate, The Autumn Equinox and Land of the Living – set in the imaginary island of Cayuna, which is a fictionalized Jamaica (the map of Cayuna included with the novels bears a remarkable resemblance to Jamaica), and which referred to issues relating to Jamaican life at the time, such as the beginning of the bauxite industry and the Rastafari movement, or to events in nearby territories such as the Cuban Revolution. He also wrote a number of short stories, one of which, "At the Stelling", set in Guyana, was included in the Independence Anthology of Jamaican Literature.

Hearne then turned to the academy and journalism – writing a regular column for the Gleaner newspaper, first under the pseudonym Jay Monroe, and later under his own name, and administering the Creative Arts Centre (now the Sir Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts) at the University of the West Indies, as the Centre's first secretary.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he collaborated with planter and journalist Morris Cargill on a series of three thrillers – Fever Grass, The Candywine Development, and The Checkerboard Caper – involving an imaginary Jamaican secret service. These were written under the pseudonym John Morris. Fever Grass is cited in the Oxford English Dictionary as a source for the use of "fuck" as a noun.

In 1985, he published his last novel, The Sure Salvation, set on a slave ship crossing the Atlantic in the mid-19th century. The voyage ends in the imaginary British South American colony of Abari, also mentioned in The Checkerboard Caper.

Legacy

In 2013, Caribbean Quarterly published the monograph John Hearne’s Life and Fiction: A Critical Biographical Study, written by his younger daughter Shivaun Hearne.

In 2016, a collection of Hearne's short fiction was published by the University of the West Indies Press, edited by Shivaun Hearne, with a foreword by Marlon James and an introduction by Kim Robinson-Walcott. Booker Prize-winner Marlon James has acknowledged that attending creative writing classes taught by Hearne at the University of the West Indies was a "game-changer" for him)

Bibliography

Voices under the Window, London: Faber, 1955
The Eye of the Storm, Boston: Little, Brown, 1958
The Faces of Love, London: Faber, 1959
Stranger at the Gate, London: Faber, 1959
The Autumn Equinox, London: Faber, 1959
Land of the Living, London: Faber, 1961
The Sure Salvation, 1985
John Hearne's Short Fiction, 2016. Edited by Shivaun Hearne; foreword by Marlon James; introduction by Kim Robinson-Walcott

As John Morris (with Morris Cargill)

Fever Grass, Collins and Sangster, Kingston, 1969
The Candywine Development, Collins and Sangster, Kingston, 1970
The Checkerboard Caper, New Jersey: The Citadel Press, 1975

References

^ Knight, Franklin W. (2005). "Hearne, John Edgar Caulwell 1926–1995". encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 6 April 2014.
Michael Hughes, "Hearne, John Edgar Colwell", A Companion to West Indian Literature, Collins, 1979, pp. 53–54.
^ Ledgister, F.S.J. (November 2013). "'I am looking for a hero'". The Caribbean Review of Books. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
"Independence anthology of Jamaican literature". H.D. Carberry Caribbean Studies Collection (University of Illinois Chicago). Retrieved 6 April 2024.
"History". PSCCA. Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts. Retrieved 4 April 2024.
"Book Review…Revelatory book resurrects life of a Caribbean icon". Kaieteur News. 24 August 2014. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
"Book renews interest in Jamaican icon". Jamaica Gleaner. 14 April 2017. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
"a road cut through the heart of the caribbean". Small Axe. June 1918. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
"John Hearne's Short Fiction". The University of the West Indies Press. November 2016. ISBN 9789766406066.
Preston, Alex (17 February 2019). "Interview | Marlon James: 'You have to risk going too far'". The Observer.
Nelson, Karlene Saundria. 2021. “A Caribbean Visionary and His Literary Collection, Karlene Saundria Nelson.” Alexandria 31 (1–3): 42–50.

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