Vanessa Spence

Vanessa Spence (born 1961, Kingston, Jamaica) is a Jamaican novelist. Her first novel, The Roads Are Down, won the 1994 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best First Novel, Canada and the Caribbean.

She grew up in Jamaica, and studied at the University of Oxford, and Yale University.^[1] She works, as an economist, in Kingston. She lives in the Blue Mountains.

• 1994, Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best First Novel, Canada and the Caribbean

• The Roads Are Down, Heinemann, 1993, ISBN 978-0-435-98930-9

• Author's website

Reviews

• "Book Review: The Roads are Down by Vanessa Spence", Wamathai, 5 May 2011

Criticism

• "Her foolish heart", The Caribbean Review of Books, May 2009
• "Revolutionary roads", The Caribbean Review of Books, July 2010