Erna Brodber

Erna Brodber (born 20 April 1940) is a Jamaican writer, sociologist and social activist. She is the sister of writer Velma Pollard.

Biography
Born in the farming village of Woodside, Saint Mary Parish, Jamaica, she gained a B.A. from the University College of the West Indies, followed by an MSc and PhD, and has received a predoctoral fellowship in psychiatric anthropology. She subsequently worked as a civil servant, teacher, sociology lecturer, and researcher at the Institute for Social and Economic Research in the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, Jamaica. During Brodber's time working at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of the West Indies, she collected several oral histories of elderly people's lives in rural Jamaica, which inspired her novel, Louisiana. After working at the university, she left to work full-time in her home community of Woodside.

She is the author of five novels: Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (1980), Myal (1988), Louisiana (1994), The Rainmaker's Mistake (2007), and Nothing's Mat (2014). Brodber works as a freelance writer, researcher and lecturer in Jamaica. She has received many awards, including the Gold Musgrave medal three times: once from the Institute of Jamaica for work in literature, once from the government of Jamaica for community work, and once from the government of the Netherlands for work in literature and orature Brodber is currently Writer in Residence at the University of the West Indies.

Work
Brodber--trained as a sociologist with a Ph.D. and several publications on Jamaican society--emphasizes non-western forms of understanding in her fiction, deconstructing the historical methodologies of colonialist knowledge. She works to challenge western ways of ordering the world, and to resurrect myth and tradition as a form of historical rehabilitation from the psychic damage of slavery and colonialism. She weaves fantastical, non-realist elements with traditional modes of story-telling--emphasizing both as crucial to the psychic make-up of her characters and the world around them. As seen in her novel Louisiana  Brodber also plays with western notions of time. Time is ambiguous among the characters and not exactly viewed in a straight line. The shared experiences of those in the past mingle with those in the present.

Awards and honours
She won the Caribbean and Canadian regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1989 for Myal. In 1999 she received the Jamaican Musgrave Gold Award for Literature and Orature. In 2006, she received a Prince Claus Award. She received a Windham–Campbell Literature Prize in 2017.