"Everything in my writing life, I owe to my childhood. The place I was born. The ground on which I stood," Olive Senior told a packed audience at the Central Library in Halifax in May 2019.

"The word 'ground' has a great deal of resonance for me, apart from its common usage. I will use it as a foundation of my talk, as it is a foundation of my life — a writer's life."

• Watch Olive Senior deliver Margaret Laurence Lecture, 'A Writer's Life'

The celebrated Jamaican-Canadian author shared a soulful, witty and tender exploration of becoming a writer in her recent Margaret Laurence Lecture. Since 1987, the Writers' Trust of Canada has selected a prominent Canadian author to deliver a lecture on the topic: "A Writer's Life."

Born in 1941, Olive Senior was the seventh of ten children, raised in rural Jamaica. After graduating high school, Senior came briefly to Canada as a Commonwealth Scholar to attend Carleton University in Ottawa. But it wasn't until the early 1990s that the prolific writer settled in Toronto full-time.

Senior has published 18 books of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and children's literature, including Summer Lightning and Other Stories, Over the Roofs of the World, and The Pain Tree. Her work has been translated into several languages worldwide and has won many awards for her work, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and F.J. Bressani Literary Prize.

In 1997, Senior was commissioned by the BBC to write a "letter" to a dead poet. She chose Pablo Neruda, a Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet who was also a diplomat and politician. The writer says she had a difficult time writing this poem.

Here is Olive Senior's full poem, Ode to Pablo Neruda:

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Here is Olive Senior's full poem, White:

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** This episode was produced by Mary Lynk.