Nalo Hopkinson was born 20 December 1960 in Kingston, Jamaica, to Freda and Abdur Rahman Slade Hopkinson.[4] She grew up in Guyana, Trinidad, and Canada.[5] She was raised in a literary environment; her mother was a library technician and her father a Guyanese poet, playwright and actor who also taught English and Latin.[2] By virtue of this upbringing, Hopkinson had access to writers such as Derek Walcott during her formative years, and could read Kurt Vonnegut's works by the age of six.[2] Hopkinson's writing is influenced by the fairy and folk tales she read at a young age, among which were the Afro-Caribbean stories about Anansi, as well as Western works including Gulliver's Travels, the Iliad, and the Odyssey;[6] she was also known to have read the works of Shakespeare around the time she was reading Homer.[7] Though she lived briefly in Connecticut in the U.S. during her father's tenure at Yale University, Hopkinson has said that the culture shock from her move to Toronto from Guyana at the age of 16 was something "to which [she's] still not fully reconciled".[6][8] She lived in Toronto from 1977 to 2011, before moving to Riverside, California, where she works as Professor of Creative Writing at University of California, Riverside.[9]
Hopkinson has a Master of Arts degree in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University, where she studied with her mentor and instructor, science fiction writer James Morrow. She has learning disabilities.[10]
