By DWIGHT GARNER

Jamaica Kincaid -- tall, striking, clear-eyed -- turns heads when she strides into the lobby of New York's swank Royalton Hotel one chilly day in mid-December. It's not that she is trying very hard, dressed comfortably as she is in rumpled khakis, green blazer, and a mustard-colored bandana. Kincaid simply projects a natural authority that attracts attention, and that spills over into her writing. Over the course of only four books -- the novels "Annie John" (1985) and "Lucy" (1990), the short story collection "At the Bottom of the River" (1984), and her nonfiction book about her native Antigua titled "A Small Place" (1988) -- Kincaid has carved out a unique place in the American literary landscape. Writing in spare, deceptively simple prose, her fiction vividly and often harrowingly describes the difficult coming-of-age of strong-minded girls who, very much like herself, were born into tropical poverty.

Kincaid's new novel, "The Autobiography of My Mother" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), may be her most accomplished yet. Set on the island of Dominica in the West Indies, the novel charts the wide, troubled arc of 70-year-old Xuela Claudette Richardson s life. (At birth, Kincaid's own given name was Elaine Potter Richardson.) Most notably, the book is a striking portrait of a Xuela's struggle, as a young woman, to find her own language and identity in the face of an uncaring father, a country wracked by colonialism, and a mother she never knew.

Kincaid now lives in Bennington, Vermont with her husband, the composer Allen Shawn, and their two children. In her precise, elegant British West Indies accent, Kincaid spoke freely about her life and work, notably her recent decision to quit her longtime position as a staff writer for The New Yorker -- which she now describes as "a version of People magazine" -- and her relationship with Tina Brown. "She's actually got some nice qualities," Kincaid says about her former editor. "But she can't help but be attracted to the coarse and vulgar. I wish there was a vaccine -- I would sneak it up on her."