Jan Shinebourne

Jan Lowe Shinebourne (born 1947), also published as Janice Shinebourne, is a Guyanese novelist who now lives in England.

In a unique position to be able to provide an insight into multicultural Caribbean culture, Shinebourne's is a rare and distinctive voice : She grew up on a colonial sugar plantation and was deeply affected by the dramatic changes her country went through in its transition from a colony to independence.

She wrote her early novels to record this experience.

Born in Canje, a plantation village within Berbice, Guyana, Shinebourne was educated at Berbice High School and started a BA degree at the University of Guyana but did not complete it there.

She was born there on 23 June 1947, the second of five children of her parents, Charles and Marion Lowe, when Guyana was not yet independent and still very much a British colony under the rule of the British government.

She describes her early experiences at Rose Hall as extremely colonial.

The estate was run along strict colonial lines whereby people were assigned their social status in terms of a pyramid structure of race and class.

At the top were the minority white expatriates who ran the estate, they lived in exclusive quarters with all the facilities of running water, electricity, and modern conveniences in their luxurious homes, while at the bottom of the pyramid were the majority, i.e., the other races, including Africans and Indians who lived in squalid conditions, in inadequate housing without running water, electricity, and the amenities of modern life enjoyed by the expats.

Shinebourne's own family were not estate workers, her father ran a grocery but growing up on the estate, she witnessed first-hand the injustices and suffering of the workers which led her to write about the effects of colonialism in Guyana which she describes as a central theme in her early writing, especially her first three novels, Timepiece, The Last English Plantation, and Chinese Women.

These novels portray colonial British Guiana as a formative influence.

It has been wrongly stated that her writing focuses on the Chinese but this is not true.

She is not interested in focusing on any one ethnic group in Guyana.

She has been mainly focused on capturing the environment that shaped her from her early years in colonial British Guiana through to the postcolonial period of Independence when the country was renamed Guyana.

In her youth.

these were periods of intense and dramatic change that were recorded in the daily newspapers which she read avidly in her youth.

She has said that change was happening so fast, she used to feel the country and its people were swept up in a storm of events and rapid change, and to her, it felt confusing, frightening, it was all so dramatic, it had to come out in her writing which she began to do in her early teenage years.

In her first two novels, people are living through those times, in them she was trying to capture the environment that shaped her and shaped Guyana.

She wanted to show how these changes impacted on people and their relationships in Guyana.

She says she gets very irritated when people say she is a Chinese writer who is mainly interested in writing about only one ethnic group in Guyana, the Chinese people.

She insists she is concerned about Guyana as whole, in what it has been in the past and where it is going in the future.

Her first novel, Timepiece, was a first step in this direction, in exploring this theme.

She started working on it when she was 19 and left Rose Hall estate to work in the capital, Georgetown,.She says it was a difficult experience for her.

She worked in a bank and at month end would return to Rose Hall to give her parents a financial contribution to help pay for the school fees of her younger siblings, something she was proud of doing, that made her feel good about herself, that she was becoming a responsible adult, but she found Georgetown a difficult place because there, you were judged by your class status which was tied up with race.

In Timepiece, she writes about a young woman, Sandra Yansen, who has grown up in a rural village where she felt rooted in her rural community which she loves.

When she leaves school, she moves to the capital Georgetown.

In Georgetown, she feels uprooted and adrift because she has no friends and family there.

She does not like the cynicism in people she meets.

They have no sense of community, they are not strongly connected to each other like the people in her village, their relationships are casual and shallow.

She began writing in the mid-1960s, and in 1974 was a prize-winner in the National History and Arts Council Literary Competition.

While living in England she developed a friendship with writer and publisher John La Rose, who introduced her to many people that would have an influence of her career.

After living in London for 40 years, she made the move to Sussex, which is where she currently lives.

Her works have been praised by Anne Jordan and Chris Searle for her literary value and political engagement.

Shinebourne is the author of novels, short stories, and essays.

The major concern of her novels is to capture the colonial and postcolonial experience of the country of her birth, Guyana, so as to understand its problems and difficulties.

Shinebourne has a rare voice in her writing style that distinguishes her from other authors.

In her first four books, Shinebourne has written about the place where she was born and spent her childhood – Rose Hall sugar estate in Berbice, Guyana.

In 1970, she married John Shinebourne and moved to London where she completed her degree and a Postgraduate Certificate in Education, then taught in several London colleges, then did an MA in English at the University of London and became involved in civil rights politics.

In 2006, she moved from London to Sussex where she now lives.

While living there, Shinebourne did her postgraduate literary studies at the University of London and obtained her Bachelor of Arts in English.

Moreover, she then began lecturing at colleges and universities and also became the co-editor of Southhall Review.