Claire Adam

Claire Adam is a Trinidadian novelist who grew up in Trinidad and later moved to London, where she studied creative writing at Goldsmiths. Her debut novel Golden Child (2019, Faber & Faber) is set in Trinidad and follows a father, Clyde, who is forced by poverty and circumstance to make an impossible choice between his twin sons — one intellectually gifted, one struggling and missing. Written in a spare, quietly devastating prose, the novel explores family love, economic desperation, and the distorting effects of colonial hierarchy. It won the Desmond Elliott Prize in 2019 and received widespread critical acclaim for its moral intelligence and narrative economy. Adam's work has been placed in a tradition of Caribbean literary fiction and compared to V. S. Naipaul and Earl Lovelace for its examination of post-colonial Trinidad.