The queues wound their way to the largest congress hall at the Swedish Exhibition and Congress Centre in Gothenburg, where one of the stars of world literature received a statuette and took part in a stage conversation with Jessica Gedin, host of "Babel".
When Jamaica Kincaid took her current name as a young woman, it was so that her mother would never know that her daughter had embarked on something as financially unstable as writing. Although she was afraid of failure, she didn't let that stop her.
So far, in everything I've done, I've been convinced that it would be a failure, but I'm doing it anyway, she said calmly.
No danger
Writing a sentence incorrectly or writing a lousy book is nothing to feel bad about, she thought.
I would have been ashamed if I had enslaved someone, I would have been ashamed if I had put a bunch of people in an oven and burned them - those are things to be ashamed of.
As a young nanny and writer in New York, Jamaica Kincaid stopped sending her paychecks home to her mother in Antigua, she says, and instead bought herself expensive clothes from her favourite store.
It was located in a beautiful building that the worst person on earth today, Donald Trump, bought and demolished to erect what he calls Trump Tower, a disgrace to our modern existence.
Radical
Wearing a T-shirt with the text "I can't breathe," Kincaid quietly explained that she is becoming more and more radical as she gets older.
I'm becoming more and more sensitive to injustice. I'm upset, I thought the world would be more just but the injustices just keep increasing. It's like cake batter being whipped to double its size. It just keeps growing and growing.
Born: 1949 in Antigua
Lives: In Vermont, USA.
Selected books: Debuted with the short story collection "At the Bottom of the River" in 1984. Other well-known novels are "Annie John", "Lucy", "The Autobiography of My Mother" and the essay "A Small Place", as well as "Mr. Potter" and "See Now Then". She has also written "(The Book of) My Garden".
Jamaica Kincaid is also a professor of African and American studies at Harvard.
