Elean Thomas

Elean Roslyn Thomas (18 September 1947 – 27 May 2004) was a Jamaican poet, novelist, journalist and activist. She was active in the struggle for women's rights in the Caribbean and the movement for Jamaican national independence, as well as working in Latin America, Eastern and Western Europe and Africa. She was married (1988–1998) to human rights barrister Anthony Gifford.

Biography Elean Thomas was born in St. Catherine, Jamaica, to a health-worker mother and a father (Rt. Rev. David Thomas) who was a Pentecostal bishop.

She attended the University of the West Indies (UWI) in the late 1960s, reading politics and history, and did postgraduate work in communications at Goldsmiths College, London University.

In the 1970s, she was employed as a reporter by the Jamaica Gleaner, and was head of the editorial department of the Jamaica Information Service, as well as working with other small publications. She also served on the executive of the Press Association of Jamaica.

Alongside Trevor Munroe and others, she was a founder-member of the Workers Party of Jamaica (WPJ) and, as its international secretary, served on the editorial board of World Marxist Review, which was based in Prague, Czechoslovakia; as a consequence she travelled throughout Europe, while also building strong connections in South Africa. In 1988, Karia also published her second collection, Before They Can Speak of Flowers: Word Rhythms, which had a foreword by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and an introduction by Benjamin Zephaniah.

Her novel, The Last Room, was published by Virago Press in 1991, winning the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award for best first novel published in Britain. Elean Thomas's work is anthologised in Daughters of Africa (1992), edited by Margaret Busby.

Elean Thomas died from cancer aged 56 at the Hope Institute in Kingston, Jamaica, on 27 May 2004.