Olga Maynard - Early Years

Early Years

Born in Belém do Pará in the Amazonia part of Brazil, as Myriol Olga Gittens, eldest of six children of Frederick Morton Gittens and Jeanne Arsenne Borde. The family early returned to their home in Port of Spain, Trinidad, of which an ancestor, Pierre-Gustave-Louis Borde, had published a history in 1876. Precociously active in the burgeoning literary and arts scene of that city during the 1930s and 1940s, she published journalism, poetry, fiction and criticism in periodicals, notably the Trinidad Guardian newspaper. She married at nineteen and had four sons with two husbands, including future novelist Leonard Wibberley. She joined Wibberley in New York City in 1943.