James Berry was born on 28 September 1924 in the coastal village of Fair Prospect, in rural Portland, Jamaica, the fourth of six children. His father, Robert Berry, was a smallholder; his mother, Maud, was a seamstress. Berry began writing stories and poems at school. When the Second World War created a labour shortage in the United States, he was recruited at eighteen and spent six years (1942–48) working in New Orleans. This experience was formative and disturbing: Berry had not encountered the same rigid colour bar in the Caribbean, and America's institutionalised racism forced a confrontation with racial identity that would run through his writing for the rest of his life.
Returning to Jamaica, Berry felt the familiar restlessness of limited prospects. When HMT Empire Windrush sailed in 1948 he could not secure a berth; he made the journey on the second ship of that year, the SS Orbita. He settled in London, attended night school, trained as a telegrapher, and used the city's public libraries with the dedication of someone who understood they were a privilege. He said plainly: "I knew I was right for London and London was right for me." He became an early member of the Caribbean Artists Movement, founded in 1966, and served as its acting chair in 1971. Those organisational years shaped his conviction that West Indian writing in Britain needed its own platforms.
“In 1976 Berry edited *Bluefoot Traveller*, the first anthology to gather the poetry of West Indians living in Britain, published by his own Limestone Publications.”
A C. Day Lewis Fellowship in 1977 gave him his first sustained period of full-time writing, as poet-in-residence at Vauxhall Manor comprehensive school. His debut collection, *Fractured Circles*, appeared in 1979 from John La Rose's New Beacon Books. Two years later, in 1981, he became the first poet of West Indian origin to win the Poetry Society's National Poetry Competition, with "Fantasy of an African Boy," a poem that went on to become, in the words of Alastair Niven, "one of the most anthologised Caribbean poems." In 1984 he edited *News for Babylon: The Chatto Book of Westindian-British Poetry*, considered ground-breaking not only for its contents but because its publisher, Chatto and Windus, was a mainstream house with a distinguished international poetry list.
Berry's signature formal move was the principled weaving of Jamaican Patois into standard English, treating both registers as equally valid literary languages. His poetry consistently explored the excitement and friction of Caribbean immigrant life in Britain, the weight of the transatlantic slave trade's legacy, and the texture of childhood in rural Jamaica. He was equally prolific as a children's writer: *A Thief in the Village and Other Stories* (1987) won the Smarties Prize; *Ajeemah and His Son* (1992) won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award. His last poetry collection, *A Story I Am In: Selected Poems* (2011), drew on five earlier books spanning three decades. A posthumously published picture book, *A Story About Afiya* (Lantana, 2020), illustrated by Anna Cunha, was named one of the New York Times Best Children's Books of the year.