Voices under the Window no relation Jay Monroe
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 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.
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-nineteenth century. The voyage ends in the imaginary British South American colony of Abari, also mentioned in The Checkerboard Caper.
The University of the West Indies Mona campus in Jamaica holds the John Hearne Collection spanning 1982–1994. It consists of biographical papers, tributes, correspondence, newspaper clippings related to the death of John Hearne, his manuscripts and more.
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