Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson in 1949 on the island of St. John's, Antigua. Her father was a cabinetmaker; her mother was a homemaker and political activist. Elaine had three younger brothers whose father was an older man whom her mother married after Elaine was born. She learned to read at the age of 3 and attended local schools, where she received a British-style education. The colonial school system sent very mixed messages to her as a child: she was exposed to great writers, such as Rudyard Kipling, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and John Milton, but her own cultural heritage was either denigrated or ignored in school.

When she was 16 Elaine left her family and home to become a nanny (a word she considered to be a euphemism for servant) in New York. There she earned a high school diploma and attended college. Although she had no intention at that time of becoming a writer, she soon looked for creative outlets. She began taking photography classes at the New School for Social Research and writing pieces for The Village Voice and Ingenue. Her first published piece, which appeared in Ingenue, was an interview with feminist Gloria Steinem. In 1973 the writer changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid. The name change was part of the budding author's conscious attempt to connect with her Caribbean roots while simultaneously reinventing herself in the United States.

At about this time Kincaid met George Trow, who wrote the “Talk of the Town” section of The New Yorker. Through her work as his assistant, she came to the attention of New Yorker editor William Shawn. Shawn was very impressed with her talent and hired her as a staff writer. In 1979 Kincaid married Allen Shawn, the editor's son. She wrote for the magazine until 1995, when she grew unhappy with the new editor, Tina Brown.

It was while writing for The New Yorker that Kincaid found her voice. Her first piece of fiction, ‘Girl' (1978), was a passionate and angry description of a mother figure. Maternal themes would recur often throughout Kincaid's career. Her first book was ‘At the Bottom of the River' (1983), a collection of largely autobiographical short stories and essays, followed by ‘Annie John' (1985), a story of a Caribbean girl's coming of age. In both books, the mother-daughter relationship is of central importance.

Kincaid's next book, ‘A Small Place' (1988), was a nonfiction exploration of the legacy of colonialism in her native Antigua. ‘Lucy', another fictional work, was published in 1990. The book describes the relationship between a young woman from the Caribbean and the white family for which she works as a nanny. This story also draws from Kincaid's own life experiences.

Kincaid addressed the autobiographical nature of her work in an interview. She said, “I write about myself for the most part, and about things that have happened to me. Everything I say is true, and everything I say is not true. You couldn't admit any of it to a court of law. It would not be good evidence.” Along with blurring the line between fact and fiction, Kincaid's work did not easily fit into traditional categories of form. Many of her pieces were not novels, short stories, or essays but some unique hybrid of all three.

In 1996 Kincaid published a fourth book, ‘The Autobiography of My Mother', which became a national bestseller. The book, which begins with the sentence, “My mother died at the moment I was born,” again focuses on mothers and daughters, this time through the eyes of a 70-year-old Dominican woman named Xuela Claudette Richardson. In 1997 ‘My Brother', a memoir of the death of Kincaid's brother from AIDS, was published.

Kincaid was devoted in gardening and tended an extensive garden outside of her Bennington, Vt., home. For her, gardening, like writing, was connected to her Caribbean roots. Many plants and flowers were extracted and renamed by Europeans during the colonial period. By replanting them in her own garden Kincaid reaffirmed their Caribbean origins, along with her own. These issues were often the subject of a gardening column she wrote for The New Yorker. In addition to writing and gardening, Kincaid taught fiction writing and English part-time at Harvard University.

Kincaid won many awards throughout her career, including the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters for ‘At the Bottom of the River' (which was also nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award) and a 1983 writing award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She and her husband had two children.