About Horane Smith
Horane Smith, an award-winning author, has had a distinguished career as a writer, having worked in television, radio, and newspaper for over twenty years. A writer all his working life, Horane Smith has been concentrating on creative writing in recent years. His published books range from slavery legends to piracy in the Caribbean, lynchings in America, the Underground Railroad movement in Canada, Jamaican Maroons in Canada, adventure tourism, marriage issues, and Jamaica’s most invisible export – reggae music.
His first novel Lover’s Leap: Based on the Jamaican Legend, was published to international acclaim in the U.K. in 1999, and to date is his best-selling novel. The novel was the subject of a major study that focuses on the enslaved Africans in Caribbean literature as it affects master-slave relationships.
The study “Fight, Love, and Flee, Cognitive Dissonance in Horane Smith’s Lover’s Leap,” was published in Orbis Litterarum, an international journal devoted to the study of European and American literature. The study’s author said “Horane Smith “is one of the writers who breathe life into the past in their texts. Smith attempts to raise the Caribbean black men’s awareness and understanding of the institutions of slavery and the colonial forces that have conspired to disturb their psyches and de- Africanize them, making them lose touch with their harmonious selves and their roots,” the Professor Abdelmotagally noted.
Dawn at Lover’s Leap, the sequel to Lover’s Leap, was a finalist in the USA Booknews Best Book Award for Historical Fiction. Morant Bay: Based on the Jamaican Rebellion completes the trilogy of the Lover’s Leap saga. It is set in Morant Bay during the time of the rebellion in 1865.
He has also written Port Royal, a story about the pirates who made the infamous city their home; Underground to Freedom, a story of the Underground Railroad when thousands of American slaves sought freedom in Canada. The Lynching Stream is another of his novels that focuses on American history, recapturing a time when thousands of innocent people, mostly African Americans, were lynched in the United States.
Reggae Silver is his first contemporary work of fiction. Dubbed “the greatest reggae story ever told,” the novel tells how one ambitious Jamaican singer vowed to become the biggest reggae superstar since Bob Marley, despite his imprisonment for a crime he did not commit. Other works of fiction include Shortcut to Hell, When a Marriage Goes Blue, The Picker, and The Will to Live and Marooned in Nova Scotia, a story about the Jamaican Maroons, who were deported to Canada in the 18th century.
Books by the author
The Queen’s Plate
Coming in 2024
Three missing young girls and a subsequent double murder shatter the quiet and small Jamaican town of Parrot Valley. A deportee from Brooklyn, New York, is the first suspect at a time when the island grapples with a possible link between deportees and increasing crimes. The mystery unfolds..
