10/18/2026
Behold some of the photos from the launch of Pamela Mordecai’s gorgeous new collection of short fiction, Two Days in Mayaro (Goose Lane Editions).
We love that you can see Pamela‘s dazzling charm, sparkling humour, and wit, which shines through in every single one of her stories too. ✨
More about Two Days in Mayaro:
Only two months in Toronto, a young man gets in trouble at school for being restless and disruptive. A stone-throwing duppy smashes an elderly couple’s car window as they drive past a graveyard. An 80-year-old woman goes to great lengths to get the sugar needed to bake a cake for a soon-to-be-arriving visitor.
Two Days in Mayaro brings together a new collection of stories that showcases the astonishing range and depth of Pamela Mordecai’s writing. Set largely in the Jamaican diaspora, Mordecai’s stories are alive with sound and often driven by dazzling yet subtle reimaginings of lore, ancestry, and history.
Mordecai’s characters cope with the universal experiences of birth and death, joy and betrayal, reckoning with both their present and past. In this multidimensional universe, Mordecai mixes Jamaican Patwa with standard English and profanity with reverence, making her characters all the more real by introducing uncanny detail at just the right moment or by turning confusion on its head to make us laugh.
Pamela Mordecai has published poetry, fiction, plays, anthologies and textbooks for children and adults. The Guardian’s Tony Mitton said her “Caribbean Counting Poem” was one of the “Top Ten [children’s] Poems to Remember and Recite,” alongside poetry by Robert Louis Stevenson E. V. Rieu, Charles Causley and Walter de la Mere. This child’s sensibility infuses her writing with what Jim Bartley of the Globe and Mail called “an unexpected yet highly fluid mix of picaresque humour and unsparing human observation.” The jury for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for which she was shortlisted in 2015, described her novel, Red Jacket, as “a b***y meditation on storytelling and the art of writing.” Born in Kingston, Jamaica, she often writes in Jamaican Patwa or Patwa-inflected English. Pamela lives in Toronto.
🫶🏼: PAMELA MORDECAI
