Heinemann's Caribbean Writers Series | ||
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![]() | ![]() | [ 0001 ] Anthony, Michael. The Year in San Fernando. Portsmouth. 1970. Heinemann. 0435980319. Caribbean Writers Series. 137 pages. paperback. CWS 1. Cover design by Joint Graphics.
DESCRIPTION - Sparkling clarity, gentleness and irony' were the qualities admired by a Sunday Times reviewer in Michael Anthony's first novel. They appear again in THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO. It is so deeply experienced and so accurately evoked that we ourselves live it. Twelve-year-old Francis is the son of a widowed mother, very poor, who is struggling to raise her family in Mayaro, a Trinidadian village. The boy gets the chance to go for a year to San Fernando to work as servant-companion to old Mrs. Chandles who lives with her grand and frightening son. His mother considers it a splendid opportunity for him, but he is scared: he has never seen a town, or a house with pictures on the walls and never been away from the warmth of his family.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - MICHAEL ANTHONY has an exceptional talent for evoking childhood. THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO (CWS 1) is an outstanding example but the other titles are equally sensitive portrayals of growing up in Trinidad. THE GAMES WERE COMING (CWS 17). GREEN DAYS BY THE RIVER (CWS 9) and CRICKET IN THE ROAD (CWS 16) all appear in the Caribbean Writers Series. He has also published STREETS OF CONFLICT, a novel set in Brazil. Michael Anthony was born in Mayaro in 1932. He worked as a moulder in an iron foundry at Pointe. a Pierre, Trinidad, before he went to England in 1955, where he worked in factories, for the railways and as a telegraphist. He then went to Brazil and since returning to Trinidad has written books about the history of Port of Spain and Trinidad. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0002 ] Mittelholzer, Edgar. Corentyne Thunder. London. 1970. Heinemann. 0435985930. Caribbean Writers Series. 229 pages. paperback. CWS2. Cover illustration by Joint Graphics.
DESCRIPTION - Ramgolall, a cow-minder on the coast of Guyana has slowly hoarded shillings in a canister in his hut and slowly increased his herd of cows. Each of his two wives has been kept short of money and the fact that Sosee, a daughter by his first marriage, has gone to live with a white planter, Big Man Weldon, is a source of financial satisfaction. Sosee's eldest son, Geoffry, is light-skinned and ambitious. He is mildly fascinated by his peasant relations. He starts an affair with his half-sister, Kattree, and ruthlessly drops her when she is pregnant, lest she spoil his chances. The book rides toward a crisis when it seems certain that another peasant, Jannee, has murdered the cheerful and provoking Boorharry on a dark night of thunder and lightning. Jannee's life is saved by an expensive lawyer, but it costs the life of Ramgolall. Corentyne Thunder was published in 1941 by Eyre & Spottiswoode but, according to journalist Colin Rickards, a German bomb destroyed warehouse where the books resided, leaving only a few advance copies sent out for review to survive.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, nee Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR,. one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes' in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was. pornographic.' The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being. a problem author,' and after 1961, he tells us, he lived. under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium' (Jacqueline Mittelholzer,. The Idyll and the Warrior,' p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965). |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0003 ] Naipaul, V. S. The Mystic Masseur. Oxford. 1971. Heinemann. 0435986465. Caribbean Writers Series. Introduction by Paul Edwards and Keith Ramchand. paperback. CWS3. Cover design by Joint Graphics.
DESCRIPTION - Here is the astringent wit of an Aubrey Mennen turned loose in the rich landscape of a Caribbean isle. V. S. Naipaul is an extraordinary storyteller - a voice from Trinidad of today, as contemporary and exciting as Calypso - and in THE MYSTIC MASSEUR he has created one of the most amusing and fascinating characters in contemporary fiction, Ganesh Rasumair. If Ganesh had not been so unappreciated as a schoolteacher, he would never have become a masseur. If he had not lacked talent as an ordinary masseur, he would never have blossomed into a mystic one; and, of course, if he had not lived in Trinidad, at first an obscure member and finally an ornament of the Hindu community there, none of the things that happened to him would have happened in quite that way, for Trinidad, seen with the eye of humor, is a most surprising place. This is a story of success: a success that resulted, or so it seems, from inspired detachment. Achievement was not something at which Ganesh aimed but something that overtook him in oblique and unexpected ways, often appearing at first sight to be a setback but always advancing his career. Mr. Naipaul, who himself comes of an Indian family settled in Trinidad, writes with delicate precision and keeps a poker face. He occasionally permits himself a raised eyebrow and a look of wonder at the charming absurdity of human beings, but it is his reader, not he, who laughs aloud.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work. for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.' The Committee added,. Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.' The Committee also noted Naipaul's affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he. allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution', promoting. colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies'.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul's following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably. analysed' India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with. grudging affection' (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with. ungrudging affection' (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul's support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a. creative passion', and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a. mortal wound.' He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul's sometime protEgE Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia's Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of. Indian' and. African' and to concentrate on being. Trinidadian'. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul's first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0004 ] Reid, Victor Stafford. New Day. London. 1973. Heinemann. 0435987461. Caribbean Writers Series. Introduction by Mervyn Morris. paperback. CWS4.
DESCRIPTION - New Day recounts the story of Jamaica's first outcry against the English Crown rule that cemented a socio-economic and political framework of oppression three decades post-emancipation. The novel is framed as the aged narrator John Campbell's account of the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 and the series of uprisings and negotiations that finally culminates in the creation of the New Constitution in 1944. Reid employed the Jamaican dialect as a springboard for creating a distinctive literary variant and for achieving a greater depth in the English language. He was motivated to write New Day by his discontentment with how the leaders George William Gordon and Paul Bogle of the Morant Bay Rebellion (1865) were depicted in the foreign press; by reworking as characters in his novel those who had been negatively portrayed as rebels, he aimed to refute what he viewed as unfair misrepresentations of history.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Victor Stafford Reid (1 May 1913 - 25 August 1987) was a Jamaican writer born in Kingston, Jamaica, who wrote with an intent of influencing the younger generations. He was the author of several novels, three of which were aimed towards children, one play production, and several short stories. As a writer, Reid aimed to instil an awareness of legacy and tradition among the Jamaican people. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0005 ] De Lisser, H. G. Jane's Career. London. 1972. Heinemann. Caribbean Writers Series. Introduction by Keith Ramchand. paperback. CWS5.
DESCRIPTION - Jane's Career: A Story of Jamaica (1913) is a novel by H. G. de Lisser. Born and raised in Jamaica, H. G. de Lisser was one of the leading Caribbean writers of the early twentieth century. Concerned with issues of race, urban life, and modernization, de Lisser dedicated his career to representing the lives and concerns of poor and middle-class Jamaicans. In Jane's Career: A Story of Jamaica, the first West Indian novel to feature a Black protagonist, de Lisser captures the hope and struggle of a young woman leaving home for the first time. "'Jane,' he continued impressively after a pause, 'Kingston is a very big an' wicked city, an' a young girl like you, who de Lord has blessed wid a good figure an' a face, must be careful not to keep bad company.'" Preparing to send young Jane off to the Jamaican capital, village elder Daddy Buckram attempts to offer her advice on how to keep herself safe from Satan and sinners alike. Despite his serious tone and gloomy portrait of urban life, all Jane can think of is the wonder and excitement waiting for her in Kingston. Raised in the countryside, brought up in a conservative Christian family, Jane sees her new job as a means of achieving independence and establishing her own identity as a proud black woman, of forging her own path in a new, modern Jamaica. In spite of her dreams, however, Jane finds herself subjected to the cruelties of her employer Mrs. Mason, who threatens to send a letter to her parents alleging all sorts of imagined misdeeds. Through it all, she tries to maintain a sense of pride, hopeful that hard work-and even romance-will set her free.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Herbert George de Lisser (9 December 1878. 19 May 1944) was a Jamaican journalist and author. He has been called "one of the most conspicuous figures in the history of West Indian literature". He started work at the Institute of Jamaica at the age of 14. Three years later he joined the Jamaica Daily Gleaner, of which his father was editor, as a proofreader, and two years later became a reporter on the Jamaica Times. In 1903, De Lisser became assistant editor of the Gleaner and was editor within the year. He wrote several articles for the paper every day. In 1909 he published a collection of essays, In Cuba and Jamaica, and 1912 saw the publication of his second book, Twentieth Century Jamaica. He went on to produce a novel or non-fiction book every year. His first work of fiction, Jane: A Story of Jamaica, is significant for being the first West Indian novel to have a central black character. Another famous novel of his, The White Witch of Rosehall (1929), is linked to a legend of a haunting in Jamaica. De Lisser also wrote several plays. In December 1920 he began publishing an annual magazine, Planters' Punch. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0006 ] Drayton, Geoffrey. Christopher. Portsmouth. 1986. Heinemann. 0435982354. Caribbean Writers Series. Introduction by Louis James, University of Kent at Canterbury. paperback. Cover photograph by Armet Francis.
DESCRIPTION - An imaginative small boy leaves his childhood behind in the course of a school holiday. People puzzle Christopher. His father, an unsuccessful sugar planter, resents his own dependence on his wife's family and includes Christopher in his resentment. His mother, though she loves her husband, is also frightened of him and of losing the baby she is carrying - which is what happens. However, the central character in Christopher's life is his black nanny Gip, through whom he comes to know the villagers with their colourful customs and superstitions. Because of a succession of experiences, only partially understood and therefore arousing unreasonable fears and ecstatic hopes, he begins to grow up and to realise that even pain and sadness are necessary stages on the road to maturity.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Geoffrey Drayton (born 13 February 1924) is a Barbadian novelist, poet and journalist. Geoffrey Drayton was born in Barbados, and received his early education there. In 1945 he went to Cambridge University, where he read economics, after which he spent some years teaching in Ottawa, Canada, returning to England in 1953. He worked as a freelance journalist in London and Madrid. From 1954 to 1965 he worked for Petroleum Times, becoming its editor. In 1966 he became a petroleum consultant for the Economist Intelligence Unit. Drayton is the author of one volume of poetry, Three Meridians (1950), and two novels: Christopher (1959), which was first published in part in Bim magazine, and Zohara (1961). He has also written short stories, such as 'Mr Dombie the Zombie', which was broadcast on the BBC programme Caribbean Voices. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0006 ] Drayton, Geoffrey. Christopher. London. 1972. Heinemann. 0435982354. Caribbean Writers Series. Introduction by Louis James. 240 pages. paperback. CWS6. Cover design by Joint Graphics.
DESCRIPTION - An imaginative small boy leaves his childhood behind in the course of a school holiday. People puzzle Christopher. His father, an unsuccessful sugar planter, resents his own dependence on his wife's family and includes Christopher in his resentment. His mother, though she loves her husband, is also frightened of him and of losing the baby she is carrying - which is what happens. However, the central character in Christopher's life is his black nanny Gip, through whom he comes to know the villagers with their colourful customs and superstitions. Because of a succession of experiences, only partially understood and therefore arousing unreasonable fears and ecstatic hopes, he begins to grow up and to realise that even pain and sadness are necessary stages on the road to maturity.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Geoffrey Drayton (born 13 February 1924) is a Barbadian novelist, poet and journalist. Geoffrey Drayton was born in Barbados, and received his early education there. In 1945 he went to Cambridge University, where he read economics, after which he spent some years teaching in Ottawa, Canada, returning to England in 1953. He worked as a freelance journalist in London and Madrid. From 1954 to 1965 he worked for Petroleum Times, becoming its editor. In 1966 he became a petroleum consultant for the Economist Intelligence Unit. Drayton is the author of one volume of poetry, Three Meridians (1950), and two novels: Christopher (1959), which was first published in part in Bim magazine, and Zohara (1961). He has also written short stories, such as 'Mr Dombie the Zombie', which was broadcast on the BBC programme Caribbean Voices. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0007 ] Bennett, Alvin. God the Stonebreaker. Portsmouth. 1973. Heinemann. 0435981005. Caribbean Writers Series. Introduction by Louis James. 246 pages. paperback. CWS7.
DESCRIPTION - Granny Brown, known as GB to her many friends and enemies, was tenant of one of the king-sized dust-bins constructed and filled with rubbish by the slum area behind Montego Bay, Jamaica. She was a stonebreaker by profession and by genius historian of all the scandalous gossip of the community.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alvin Gladstone Bennett (1918 2004), also known as A. G. Bennett, was a Jamaican journalist, novelist, and poet. Born in Falmouth, Trelawny Parish, he left his job as a purser in 1954 to become a journalist for The Gleaner. His newspaper columns were often witty and offered "acerbic comments on the affairs of God and humanity". In 1958, he was posted to Britain as the newspaper's British correspondent. He was also a contributor to the South London Press. While in Britain, Bennett engaged in community service; his interactions with the Caribbean immigrant community would inspire his first novel, Because They Know Not, published in 1959. His second satirical novel God the Stonebreaker was published in 1964. Some of his short stories were broadcast by the BBC in the 1960s and 1970s. Bennett was also a prolific poet. His poem, "The Black Man", was published in the Jamaican newspaper Public Opinion in June 1942, whereas his undated anthology of poems, titled Out of Darkness, "displays a degree of irreverence similar to that of his novels", but comprises "conservative" poetry that is "traditional in structure". In 1982, he relocated to Canada, where he would spend the remainder of his life |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0008 ] Maran, Ren. Batouala. London. 1973. Heinemann. 0435901354. African Writers Series. Translated by Barbara Beck and Alexandre Mboukou. Introduction by Donald E. Herdeck. paperback. CWS8. Batouala was part of both the African Writers Series (AWS135) and the Caribbean Writers Series.
DESCRIPTION - A scathing indictment against Colonial rule in the French Congo. Winner of the Prix Goncourt and considered by students of African literature as the first work by a black writer to signal the break from mission literature and a movement toward an oppositional voice to the colonial enterprise. Maran, born in Martinique of French Guiana parents, is regarded as the fountainhead of black French intellectual thought in the Caribbean and Africa and is credited with encouraging a generation of writers during his career. In writing of blacks under colonial rule in Africa's Congo region, Batouala triggered not only the harsh tone that black cultural expression was going to take from there on through the Negritude movement, but also set the pace for a universal idea of the black condition.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Rene Maran (Fort-de-France, Martinique, 8 November 1887 - 9 May 1960) was a French Guyanese poet and novelist, and the first black writer to win the French Prix Goncourt (in 1921). Born on the boat carrying his parents to Fort-de-France where he lived till the age of seven. After that he went to Gabon, where his father HEmEnEglide Maran was in the colonial service. After attending boarding school in Bordeaux, France, he joined the French Colonial service in French Equatorial Africa. It was his experience there that was the basis for many of his novels, including Batouala: A True Black Novel, which won the Prix Goncourt. Jean-Paul Sartre alluded to Maran in his preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, mocking the French establishment's complacent self-congratulation that they had. on one occasion given the Prix Goncourt to a Negro'. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0009 ] Anthony, Michael. Green Days By the River. Portsmouth. 1973. Heinemann. 0435980300. Caribbean Writers Series. 192 pages. paperback. CWS 9. Cover photograph by Bill Heyes.
DESCRIPTION - GREEN DAYS BY THE RIVER is a more complex and ambitious book than THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO. With equal sensitivity it traces the response of Shell, its fifteen-year-old hero, to the transitional world between childhood and maturity. Like the twelve-year-old Francis in THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO, Shell is adjusting to a new and strange environment. When his parents move to a new village he meets new girls. He is charmed by an Indian girl Rosalie Ghidaree, and is flattered by the friendship of her father, who tacitly accepts him as a potential son- in-law. At the same time there is Joan who is more cheerful and accessible. Michael Anthony catches the confusion of a teenager growing to maturity. As the result of his personal crisis Shell grows a little closer to establishing a set of values which will make sense of the adult world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Anthony (born 10 February 1932) is an eminent Caribbean author and historian, who has been named one of the. 50 most influential people in Trinidad and Tobago. Born in Mayaro, Trinidad, on 10 February 1932 to Nathaniel Anthony and Eva Jones Lazarus. Anthony was educated at Mayaro Roman Catholic School and Junior Technical College, San Fernando, Trinidad. He subsequently took a job as a foundry worker in Pointe- -Pierre for five years but had ambitions to become a journalist, and poems of his were published by the Trinidad Guardian in 1953. Yet it was not enough for him to secure a new job locally and Anthony decided to further his career in the United Kingdom. His voyage there on board the Hildebrandt took place in December 1954. In England he held several jobs including as a sub-editor at Reuters news agency (1964-8), while developing his career as a writer, writing short stories for the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices. In 1958 he married Yvette Phillip (a poet) and they had four children. - Jennifer, Keith, Carlos and Sandra. Four years later, Anthony published his first book, The Games Were Coming, a cycling story inspired by real events. He followed up its success with The Year in San Fernando and Green Days by the River. He eventually returned to Trinidad in 1970 (after spending two years as part of the Trinidadian diplomatic corps in Brazil, where his novel King of the Masquerade is set) and worked variously as an editor, a researcher for the Ministry of Culture, and as a radio broadcaster of historical programmes. In 1992, he spent time at the University of Richmond in Virginia teaching creative writing. In his five-decade career, Anthony has had over 30 titles published, including novels, collections of short fiction, books for younger readers, travelogues and histories. He has also been a contributor to many anthologies and journals, including Caribbean Prose, Island Voices - Stories from the Caribbean, Response, The Sun's Eyes, West Indian Narrative, The Bajan, and BIM magazine. In 1979 he was awarded the Hummingbird Medal (Gold) for his contributions to Literature, and he received an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies (UWI) in 2003. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0010 ] Mais, Roger. Brother Man. London. 1974. Heinemann. 043598585x. Caribbean Writers Series. Introduction by Edward Brathwaite. paperback. CWS10.
DESCRIPTION - This novel brings alive the dance and laughter of the poor struggling for existence in the slums of Jamaica. In particular it portrays the Rastafarian cult.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Roger Mais (11 August 1905 - 21 June 1955) was a Jamaican journalist, novelist, poet, and playwright. He was born to a middle-class family in Kingston, Jamaica. By 1951, he had won ten first prizes in West Indian literary competitions. His integral role in the development of political and cultural nationalism is evidenced in his being awarded the high honour of the Order of Jamaica in 1978.Roger Mais was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and was educated at Calabar High School. He worked at various times as a photographer, insurance salesman, and journalist, launching his journalistic career as a contributor to the weekly newspaper Public Opinion from 1939 to 1952, which was associated with the People's National Party. He also wrote several plays, reviews, and short stories for the newspaper Focus and the Jamaica Daily Gleaner, concerning his articles with social injustice and inequality. He used this approach to reach his local audience and to primarily push for a national identity and anti-colonialism. Mais published more than a hundred short stories, most being found in Public Opinion and Focus. Other stories are collected in Face and Other Stories and And Most of All Man, published in the 1940s. Mais's play, George William Gordon, was also published in the 1940s, focusing on the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. It played an important role in the rehabilitation of the eponymous character, who was in conventional colonial history described as a rebel and traitor, but who would be proclaimed, on the centenary of the rebellion, a national hero. In 1944, Mais wrote the anti-British satirical tirade 'Now We Know,' criticizing British colonial rule. It resulted in his incarceration of six months in the Spanish Town Penitentiary. This period of imprisonment was instrumental in the development of his first novel, The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953), a work about working-class life in the Kingston of the 1940s. 'Why I Love and Leave Jamaica', an article written in 1950, also stirred many emotions. It labelled the bourgeoisie and the 'philistines' as shallow and criticized their impacting role on art and culture. In addition, Mais's wrote more than thirty stage and radio plays. The plays Masks and Paper Hats and Hurricane were performed in 1943, Atlanta in Calydon in 1950; The Potter's Field was published in Public Opinion (1950) and The First Sacrifice in Focus (1956). Mais left for England in 1952. He lived in London, then in Paris, and for a time in the south of France. He took an alias, Kingsley Croft, and showcased an art exhibition in Paris. His artwork also appeared on the covers of his novels. In 1953, his novel The Hills Were Joyful Together was published by Jonathan Cape in London. Soon afterwards, Brother Man (1954) was published, a sympathetic exploration of the emergent Rastafari movement. Then the following year, Black Lightning was published. While Mais's first two novels had urban settings, Black Lightning (1955) centred on an artist living in the countryside. In 1955 Mais was forced to return to Jamaica after falling ill with cancer; he died that same year in Kingston at the age of 50. His short stories were collected in a volume entitled Listen, The Wind, thirty-two years after his death. Mais's novels have been republished posthumously several times, an indication of his continuing importance to Caribbean literary history. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0011 ] Mittelholzer, Edgar. A Morning at the Office. London. 1979. Heinemann. Caribbean Writers Series. Introduction by John J. Figueroa. 246 pages. paperback. CWS11.
DESCRIPTION - The office is in Port of Spain, Trinidad. Within its four walls, during the course of a single morning, we see chance and human nature busily at work upon the lives of ordinary people. The fourteen employees, white and coloured, of Essential Products Limited are as fascinating as they are diverse - from Horace Xavier, the Negro office boy who is infatuated with the Manager's West Indian secretary, to the lackadaisical English chief accountant; from the prying, much-hated Mr. Jagabir to the enchanting Miss Bisnauth with her single-minded determination to think the best of everybody. Mr. Mittelh lzer explores the strength and weakness of his characters with understanding, with a lively humour and a shrewd eye for eccentricity; his writing has pace, colour and crispness. The result is a strikingly original novel, rich in human interest, and as readable as it is unusual.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, nee Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR,. one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes' in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was. pornographic.' The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being. a problem author,' and after 1961, he tells us, he lived. under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium' (Jacqueline Mittelholzer,. The Idyll and the Warrior,' p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965). |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0012 ] Roumain, Jacques. Masters of the Dew. London. 1978. Heinemann. 0435987453. Translated from the French by Lanston Hughes and Mercer Cook. Caribbean Writers Series. 192 pages. paperback. CWS12.
DESCRIPTION - Manuel goes back to his native village after working on a sugarcane plantation in Cuba. On his return he finds his villages stricken by drought and divided by a family feud. He preaches anew kind of political awareness and solidarity he has learnt in Cuba and goes on to illustrate his ideas in a tangible way by finding water and bringing it to the fields through the collectible labour of the villagers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jacques Roumain was born in Port-au-Prince in 1907. After being educated in Europe he identified with the resistance movement against the American occupation. He founded the Haitian Communist Party in 1934, was arrested and, after three years in prison, travelled in Europe and the United States until his return in 1941. He was sent in 1943 to the Haitian Embassy in Mexico. It was there that he completed this book Gouverneurs de la RosEe a few months before his sudden death in 1944. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0013 ] McDonald, Ian. The Humming-Bird Tree. London. 0. Heinemann. 0435989340. Caribbean Writers Series. paperback. CWS13.
DESCRIPTION - The humming-bird tree is a Trinidadian symbol of the Garden of Eden. This novel's Adam and Eve are a white Creole Trinidadian boy of eleven and the East-Indian kitchen-girl employed by his mother. They share a first love that is destined to fail, poisoned by the serpent of race and caste prejudice.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ian McDonald (born 18 April 1933) is a Caribbean-born writer who describes himself as "Antiguan by ancestry, Trinidadian by birth, Guyanese by adoption, and West Indian by conviction." His ancestry on his father's side is Antiguan and Kittitian, and Trinidadian on his mother's side. His only novel The Humming-Bird Tree, first published in 1969, is considered a classic of Caribbean literature. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0014 ] Naipaul, V. S. Miguel Street. Oxford. 1980. Heinemann. 0435986457. Caribbean Writers Series. Introduction by Laban Erapu. 384 pages. paperback. Cover photograph by Bill Heyes.
DESCRIPTION - The vibrant community of Miguel Street is brought to life through the eyes of a child. Characters, such as Bogart, Big Foot and Man-man refuse to be confined by the limitations of their everyday existence and create a more romantic version of reality. The growing boy delights in their humour and eccentricity, but he gradually becomes aware that no one can run from reality forever. MIGUEL STREET is both a nostalgic view of childhood recalled in exile and a study of the limitations 'of life in 1940s Trinidad.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (17 August 1932 - 11 August 2018), commonly known as V. S. Naipaul and, familiarly, Vidia Naipaul, was a Trinidad and Tobago-born British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English. He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker novels of alienation in the wider world, and his vigilant chronicles of life and travels. He wrote in prose that was widely admired, but his views sometimes aroused controversy. He published more than thirty books over fifty years. Naipaul won the Booker Prize in 1971 for his novel In a Free State. He won the Jerusalem Prize in 1983, and in 1989, he was awarded the Trinity Cross, Trinidad and Tobago's highest national honour. He received a knighthood in Britain in 1990, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. In the late 19th century, Naipaul's grandparents had emigrated from India to work in Trinidad's plantations as indentured servants. His breakthrough novel A House for Mr Biswas was published in 1961. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0015 ] Walcott, Derek. Selected Poetry. London. 1981. Heinemann. 043598747x. Caribbean Writers Series. Selected and introduced by Wayne Brown. paperback. CWS15.
DESCRIPTION - This anthology of poetry is selected to portray the various themes of the Caribbean.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sir Derek Alton Walcott (23 January 1930 - 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0016 ] Anthony, Michael. Cricket in the Road and Other Stories. Oxford. 1973. Heinemann. 0435980327. Caribbean Writers Series. 144 pages. paperback. CWS16. Cover design by Joint Graphics.
DESCRIPTION - MICHAEL ANTHONY was born in Mayaro, Trinidad, in 1930. He published his first novel, The Games were Coming, in 1963. Two more novels followed shortly afterwards, The Year in San Fernando (1965) and Green Days by the River (1967). In 1968 he left England to live in Brazil. He stayed in Brazil only two years, although he considers it the most fascinating country he has ever known. Returning to Trinidad in 1970, he continued his writing career with the works of fiction Cricket in the Road (1974), Streets of Conflict (1976), Folktales and Fantasies (1977), King of the Masquerade (1977), Bright Road to El Dorado (1981), All that Glitters (1982), The Chieftain's Carnival (1993) and In the Heat of the Day (1996) as well as producing a number of books on the history of Trinidad and Tobago. In his Introduction to this collection of short stories Michael Anthony says that he started writing stories as the result of a competition in a Trinidad newspaper. What was new and refreshing to me was the treatment of local themes and the use of the local idiom. It made literature look 'real' to me. My main desire was always to, write about something I actually knew and experienced and, belonging as I do to Mayaro, it was only natural that most of my stories should be set there, although all of them have been written in England. There are only two stories set in San Fernando - Enchanted Alley, and The Day of the Fearless although I spent a childhood year and many of my adolescent years there.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - MICHAEL ANTHONY was born in Mayaro, Trinidad, where his mother still lives. The small boy in THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO who was sent off to work as a servant was Michael Anthony himse1f, and the descriptions of both village and town are marvels of exactness. His wife Yvette comes from a neighbouring village, though they first met in London. His education at San Fernando's Junior Technical School ended when he was fifteen. From '47 to '54 he worked as a moulder in an iron foundry at Pointe a Pierre. Then he came to England where he worked in several factories, as a parcels clerk at St Pancras Station, and in the GPO telegraph service. He became a journalist after joining Reuters as a teleprinter operator. After two years in Brazil, the Anthony family (they have four children) returned to Trinidad and settled in Chaguanas. Michael Anthony was employed by the National Cultural Council and worked on the production of educational books for children. He began his writing career in 1951, contributing stories and poems to the Trinidad Guardian. Later he had many stories published in BIM, the well-known West Indian literary magazine published in Barbados. We published his first novel, THE GAMES WERE COMING, in 1963; THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO in 1965; and GREEN DAYS BY THE RIVER in 1967. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0017 ] Anthony, Michael. The Games Were Coming. London. 0. Heinemann. 0435980335. Caribbean Writers Series. Introduction by Keith Ramchand. paperback. CWS17.
DESCRIPTION - Leon is in training for the great bicycle race in the Southern Games in Trinidad. He is so obsessed by the race that he has dismissed everybody in his life, even his girlfriend Sylvia. But she makes sure it doesn't stop there.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - MICHAEL ANTHONY was born in Mayaro, Trinidad, where his mother still lives. The small boy in THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO who was sent off to work as a servant was Michael Anthony himse1f, and the descriptions of both village and town are marvels of exactness. His wife Yvette comes from a neighbouring village, though they first met in London. His education at San Fernando's Junior Technical School ended when he was fifteen. From '47 to '54 he worked as a moulder in an iron foundry at Pointe a Pierre. Then he came to England where he worked in several factories, as a parcels clerk at St Pancras Station, and in the GPO telegraph service. He became a journalist after joining Reuters as a teleprinter operator. After two years in Brazil, the Anthony family (they have four children) returned to Trinidad and settled in Chaguanas. Michael Anthony was employed by the National Cultural Council and worked on the production of educational books for children. He began his writing career in 1951, contributing stories and poems to the Trinidad Guardian. Later he had many stories published in BIM, the well-known West Indian literary magazine published in Barbados. We published his first novel, THE GAMES WERE COMING, in 1963; THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO in 1965; and GREEN DAYS BY THE RIVER in 1967. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0018 ] Reid, Victor Stafford. The Leopard. London. 0. Heinemann. Caribbean Writers Series. 128 pages. paperback. CWS18.
DESCRIPTION - Set in Kenya during the Mau Mau period, The Leopard is the story of Nebu, a kikuyu who was once a houseboy for an English plantation owner. Now he is a Mau Mau who takes pleasure in witnessing the deaths of his former white masters. The novel focuses on the relationship between black people and white people. This is done through the collision, in the African bush, of three people; Nebu, Bwana Gibson, a white man, and Toto, a. grey'.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1913, Reid held several posts in the Jamaican government. His first novel, New Day was published in 1949. Soon after Reid published a novel written for young people called Sixty-Five. Reid also wrote a number of novels for school children including The Young Warriors (1967) Peter of Mount Ephraim (1971). His next novel, The Jamaican, was written in 1976. Nanny Town (1983) was Reid's last published novel. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0019 ] Selvon, Samuel. Turn Again Tiger. London. 1979. Heinemann. 0435987801. Caribbean Writers Series. Introduction by Sandra Pouchet Paquel. paperback. CWS19.
DESCRIPTION - Tiger boy, one thing with you, your mind not hard to change. One day you singing the blues, the next day you humming a hot calypso.' In the spicy racial melange of Five Rivers Village on Trinidad Island, Tiger from Chaguanas is a man apart - a born leader, quick-witted, rebellious, vitally dominant. Tiger's refusal to embrace the delicious indolence of native life strikes the counterpoint of discord in the easy rhythm of the Island. After a hilarious all-night. freeness' where friends come and go with the rum flow, Tiger turns his back on his home village to follow his father to the experimental sugar cane station in Five Rivers. You stay in one place and you live and dead and that's all,' Tiger decides as he begins his year of trial. High-spirited and restless, unfulfilled by a seemingly useless education (. is like one-eye man in blind-eye country'), Tiger races along a precipice, stumbling almost fatally into a dramatic encounter with the bored and beautiful wife of the white plantation supervisor. The resolution of this meeting is Tiger's coming-of-age, as his early contempt of his people's simple ways Samuel Selvon gives ground to a deep and meaningful understanding of Island life. It is through Tiger that we meet the delightful potpourri of islanders: the high dreamer, More Lazy, who can savor life only while reclining; the quixotic Hindu peddler, Soylo, the somnambulant Chinese shopkeeper Otto, dedicated to the pacific joys of opium and sleep; his young bride, Berta, who in flirtatious passing manages to disrupt not only Otto, but the males of the whole village. Samuel Selvon, a native Trinidadian, uses the idiom of his people to evoke the exuberance and gaiety, the pleasures and pastimes, with which the islanders hold their precarious existence in innocent embrace. Written with compassion and understanding, this quickly moving story runs a fluent commentary on the ways and byways of native society that will surprise and delight the enamoured observer of island life.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - SAMUEL SELVON was born in Trinidad of Indian parents. He went to school and college on the Island, and during the war served for five years as a telegraphist in a mine-sweeper. After the war, he worked on The Trinidad Guardian, and began to write short stories in his spare time, several of which were accepted by the B.B.C. Encouraged by this success, he came to England, bringing with him the manuscript of a novel called A BRIGHTER SUN, which was published by Wingates in 1952 and by Viking in the United States. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his second novel, AN ISLAND IS A WORLD. THE LONELY LONDONERS is his third novel and the second to be published in America. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0020 ] Lovelace, Earl. The Schoolmaster. London. 1979. Heinemann. 0435989502. Caribbean Writers Series. 192 pages. paperback. CWS20.
DESCRIPTION - In Kumaca, a remote Trinidadian village, life follows that same pattern from one generation to the next. Paulaine Dandrade wants to see progress, and helps to persuade the other villagers tobuild a school. But he never imagines that the arrival of the schoolmaster will bring violence and tragedy to his own family.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Earl Lovelace was born in Trinidad in 1935, and spent his childhood in Tobago and Port of Spain. A collection of his plays, Jestina's Calypso and Other Plays, was published in 1984. His first novel, While Gods Are Falling, was published in 1965 and it was followed by The Schoolmaster (1968). Other works include The Dragon Can't Dance (1979) which is regarded by many critics as his best work, In The Wine of Astonishment (1982) and Salt, published in 1996. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0020 ] Lovelace, Earl. The Schoolmaster. London. 1997. Heinemann. 0435989502. Caribbean Writers Series. 192 pages. paperback. CWS20.
DESCRIPTION - In Kumaca, a remote Trinidadian village, life follows that same pattern from one generation to the next. Paulaine Dandrade wants to see progress, and helps to persuade the other villagers tobuild a school. But he never imagines that the arrival of the schoolmaster will bring violence and tragedy to his own family.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Earl Lovelace was born in Trinidad in 1935, and spent his childhood in Tobago and Port of Spain. A collection of his plays, Jestina's Calypso and Other Plays, was published in 1984. His first novel, While Gods Are Falling, was published in 1965 and it was followed by The Schoolmaster (1968). Other works include The Dragon Can't Dance (1979) which is regarded by many critics as his best work, In The Wine of Astonishment (1982) and Salt, published in 1996. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0021 ] Zobel, Joseph. Black Shack Alley. London. 1980. Heinemann. 043598800x. Caribbean Writers Series. Introduction by Keith Warner. 182 pages. paperback. CWS21. Cover photograph by Bill Heyes.
DESCRIPTION - Joseph Zobel was born in Martinique in 1915. He wanted to become an interior decorator but in 1937 became a civil servant. His first novel Diab'la was published in 1942. When Martinique joined Free France, Zobel became Press AttachE to the Governor. In 1942 he published Les Jours Immobiles and went to study at the Sorbonne. This book was published as La Rue Cases-NEgres in 1950 and won the Prix des Lecteurs. The sequel La FEte. Paris followed in 1953. He has also continued to publish collections of stories and poetry. In 1957 he went to work in Senegal and was chosen to reorganize the Ecole des Arts in Dakar in 1961. He found that 'twenty years among the Senegalese do not allow me to withstand any other transplantation', so he gave up ideas of returning to Martinique. Although he lives in France he expects to return to Senegal. Jose grows up on the plantation with his grandmother M'man Tine. She appears revealed through the eyes of her grandchild as the dominating presence in the early part of the novel. As Jose grows and goes on to LycEe he looks out on the adult world with eyes of innocence and becomes aware of the realities of life for blacks. He is re-united with his mother DElia in Fort de France and the colonial society in the 1930s is shown in vivid realism. Like Camara Laye's African Child, this novel was written while the author was lonely in France. Like George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin it is also about a village in colonial times. And Zobel has, like Michael Anthony, the precious gift of convincing the reader that it is a child's view of a complex world. Zobel allows events to make their own commentary.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Joseph Zobel (April 26, 1915, in Martinique - June 18, 2006 in Al s, France) is the author of several novels and short-stories in which social issues are at the forefront. Although his most famous novel,. La Rue Cases-N gres , was published some twenty years after the great authors of Negritude published their works, Zobel was once asked if he considered himself. the novelist of Negritude.' His most famous novel, La Rue Cases-N gres (often translated as Black Shack Alley or Sugar Cane Alley), was published in Paris 1950. The novel is an account of a young boy raised by his grandmother in a post-slavery, but still plantation-based, Martinique. The struggles of the impoverished cane sugar plantation workers, and the ambitions of a loving grandmother who works hard to put the main character through school are the core subject of the novel, which also describes life in a colonial society. Zobel stated that the novel was his version of Richard Wright's Black Boy in that they are both semi-autobiographical. The novel was adapted to the screen by Euzhan Palcy in 1983 as Sugar Cane Alley. While La Rue Cases-N gres is the most renowned work from Joseph Zobel, the author started his writing career in 1942 during World War Two with Diab-la (a tentative English title could be : The Devil's Garden), a socially conscious novel similar to Jacques Roumains' Masters of the Dew (published one year or more later). With Diab-la, Zobel tells the powerful story of a sugar cane plantation worker freeing himself from colonial exploitation by creating a garden in a fishermen's village of Southern Martinique. Leaving Martinique in 1946 to pursue ethnology and drama studies in Paris, Joseph Zobel spent some years in Paris and Fontainebleau, before relocating in Senegal by 1957. Writing a few short stories, he had a notable impact in the cultural life of French-speaking West Africa as a public radio producer. Also a noted poet and a gifted sculptor, Joseph Zobel retired in a small village of Southern France by 1974 and died in 2006. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0022 ] Williams, Denis. Other Leopards. London. 1983. Heinemann. 0435985906. Caribbean Writers Series #22. Introduction by Edward Baugh. 222 pages. Cover photograph by Chris Yates.
DESCRIPTION - 'It began, way back, with those two names: the one [Lionel] on my birth certificate, on my black-Frank-Sinatra face; and the one [Lobo] I carried -like a pregnant load waiting to be freed and to take itself with every despatch back to the swamps and forests. of my South American home. All along, ever since I'd felt I ought to become this, alter ego of ancestral times that I was sure quietly slumbered behind the cultivated mask.' Estrangement from one's source is the theme of Denis Williams' remarkable first novel, set somewhere in the Sudanic Savannah. Kenneth Ramchand says, 'It is a measure of Williams' triumph that although the novel is set in Africa and works through African material, it is the universal dimension of [Lionel's] case. - the abortive quest for origins. - that emerges from this fiction.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Denis Williams (1 February 1923 - 28 June 1998) was a Guyanese painter, author and archaeologist. Dr. Denis Joseph Ivan Williams, C.C.H., Hon. D. Lit., M.A., called by his friends "Sonny" Williams, was born in Georgetown, Guyana, where he received his early education; he was granted a Cambridge Junior School Certificate in 1940 and a Cambridge Senior School Certificate in 1941. His promise as a painter won him a two-year British Council Scholarship to the Camberwell School of Art in London in 1946. He lived in London for the next 10 years, during which he taught fine art and held several one-man shows of his work as well as producing the artwork for Bajan novelist George Lamming's first book In the Castle of my Skin. From 1957 to 1967 he taught art and art history at the School of Fine Art, Khartoum, Sudan; the University of Ife, Nigeria; Makerere University, Uganda; and the University of Lagos, Nigeria. He also published numerous articles on the history and iconography of West African classical art expressed especially in brass, bronze, and iron, and a book, Icon and Image: A Study of Sacred and Secular Forms of African Classical Art (1974, New York University Press). Williams had been exposed to archaeology in Sudan and renewed his interest in 1968 when he finally returned to Guyana and established a homestead in the Mazaruni District. In his first letter to the Smithsonian Institution in 1973, he said: "my interest in these antiquities is that they may explain something about the who and how, as well as the when of the arts of the Guyana Indians." His appointment in 1974 as director of the newly created Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology in Georgetown provided the opportunity to pursue this quest. Initially, he concentrated his attention on petroglyphs, not only recording the designs, but excavating to recover the tools used and observing the environmental contexts. His Master's thesis, The Aishalton Petroglyph Complex in the Prehistory of the Rupununi Savannas, submitted to the University of Guyana in 1979, presented ideas elaborated in a 1985 article published in the journal Advances in World Archaeology. In 1980 he began intensive archaeological and paleoclimatic investigations of the shell middens on the northwest coast of Guyana. From the beginning of his studies, he was aware of potential disturbance of stratigraphy, errors in radiocarbon dates, and other pitfalls, and some of his efforts to detect them were detailed in Early Pottery on the Amazon: A Correction. Evidence for a correlation between the declining productivity of mangrove resources and changes in artefacts and settlement behaviour was summarised in Some Subsistence Implications of Holocene Climatic Change in Northwestern Guyana. His observation that the methods employed by the Warao for processing palm starch are preadapted for eliminating the poison from bitter manioc offers a reasonable explanation for the origin of this remarkable technology. A monograph detailing his evidence and interpretations of the interaction between environmental change and Guyana prehistory was in press at the time of his death. He recognised the importance of publication and in 1978 founded Archaeology and Anthropology, the journal of the Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology in Georgetown. Among other journals Williams edited were Odu (the University of Ife Journal of African studies) and Lagos Notes and Records, and he contributed numerous essays on art to several books and journals. His skill as a writer is documented not only in his scientific papers, but in numerous works of fiction. In 1986 Williams and his assistant, Jennifer Wishart, initiated a programme for junior archaeologists in Guyanese secondary schools. Awards His accomplishments were recognised in several national awards, including the Golden Arrow of Achievement Award from the government of Guyana in 1973, and the Cacique Crown of Honour in 1989, the same year that he received an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0023 ] Mais, Roger. The Hills Were Joyful Together. London. 1981. Heinemann. 0435985868. Caribbean Writers Series. Introduction by Daphne Morris. paperback. CWS23.
DESCRIPTION - The author is a Jamaican and his novel is set in Jamaica. Its characters, who belong to the submerged nine-tenths of the population, are strangers to writers of books for tourists and to the tourists themselves, but not to the police nor to politicians at election times. Roger Mais, having lived and worked among them for most of his 47 years, knows them intimately; and his story, concerned with a small community of the industrious, the shiftless, the pious and the lawless, is as close to reality as art can depict it. Naive and savage, generous and cunning, sensitive and gross, their violence repels while their simple tenderness attracts. Their high spirits, their humour, their love of singing and dancing, are here contrasted with their primitive barbarity in scenes which evoke terror and pity, tears and laughter. In a style that soars into lyrical beauty and plumbs the depths of squalid tragedy, this is a novel of great power by a writer whose sincerity is not to be denied. ROGER MAIS was born at Kingston, Jamaica, in 1905. One of his great-grandfathers was sentenced to the stocks for harbouring runaway slaves. His education was sketchy and unorthodox, but liberal. He is unmarried, and is a painter, as well as a writer, and THE HILLS WERE JOYFUL TOGETHER is his first novel. His recreations are reading, the theatre and music. He says that his most interesting experience was going to jail for six months under Defence Regulations, for writing an article which was considered adverse to the War Effort, but was really only asking for a more liberal constitution (and got it). He wrote this first novel, he says, very quickly, and because he had to;. it had been gestating for years'.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Roger Mais (11 August 1905 - 21 June 1955) was a Jamaican journalist, novelist, poet, and playwright. He was born to a middle-class family in Kingston, Jamaica. By 1951, he had won ten first prizes in West Indian literary competitions. His integral role in the development of political and cultural nationalism is evidenced in his being awarded the high honour of the Order of Jamaica in 1978.Roger Mais was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and was educated at Calabar High School. He worked at various times as a photographer, insurance salesman, and journalist, launching his journalistic career as a contributor to the weekly newspaper Public Opinion from 1939 to 1952, which was associated with the People's National Party. He also wrote several plays, reviews, and short stories for the newspaper Focus and the Jamaica Daily Gleaner, concerning his articles with social injustice and inequality. He used this approach to reach his local audience and to primarily push for a national identity and anti-colonialism. Mais published more than a hundred short stories, most being found in Public Opinion and Focus. Other stories are collected in Face and Other Stories and And Most of All Man, published in the 1940s. Mais's play, George William Gordon, was also published in the 1940s, focusing on the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. It played an important role in the rehabilitation of the eponymous character, who was in conventional colonial history described as a rebel and traitor, but who would be proclaimed, on the centenary of the rebellion, a national hero. In 1944, Mais wrote the anti-British satirical tirade 'Now We Know,' criticizing British colonial rule. It resulted in his incarceration of six months in the Spanish Town Penitentiary. This period of imprisonment was instrumental in the development of his first novel, The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953), a work about working-class life in the Kingston of the 1940s. 'Why I Love and Leave Jamaica', an article written in 1950, also stirred many emotions. It labelled the bourgeoisie and the 'philistines' as shallow and criticized their impacting role on art and culture. In addition, Mais's wrote more than thirty stage and radio plays. The plays Masks and Paper Hats and Hurricane were performed in 1943, Atlanta in Calydon in 1950; The Potter's Field was published in Public Opinion (1950) and The First Sacrifice in Focus (1956). Mais left for England in 1952. He lived in London, then in Paris, and for a time in the south of France. He took an alias, Kingsley Croft, and showcased an art exhibition in Paris. His artwork also appeared on the covers of his novels. In 1953, his novel The Hills Were Joyful Together was published by Jonathan Cape in London. Soon afterwards, Brother Man (1954) was published, a sympathetic exploration of the emergent Rastafari movement. Then the following year, Black Lightning was published. While Mais's first two novels had urban settings, Black Lightning (1955) centred on an artist living in the countryside. In 1955 Mais was forced to return to Jamaica after falling ill with cancer; he died that same year in Kingston at the age of 50. His short stories were collected in a volume entitled Listen, The Wind, thirty-two years after his death. Mais's novels have been republished posthumously several times, an indication of his continuing importance to Caribbean literary history. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0024 ] Hodge, Merle. Crick Crack, Monkey. Portsmouth. 1981. Heinemann. 0435984012. Caribbean Writers Series. 255 pages. paperback. CWS 24. Cover photograph by Armet Francis.
DESCRIPTION - The world of CRICK CRACK, MONKEY is a dual one. Tee, the central character, is suspended between the warmth, spontaneity and exuberance of Tantie's household, into which she and her brother are received when their father emigrates to England, and the formality and pretension of Aunt Beatrice's world, which Tee is obliged to accept when she wins a scholarship. Tee's initiation into the negro middle class is an uneasy one: she is confused and disturbed by the discrimination of colour and class that she learns at Aunt Beatrice's hands and by the attitudes and values that divide her two aunts. The dislocation that Tee feels, the sense of alienation aroused by her discovery of a society marked by its gentility and affectation, the consequent erosion of dignity, early memories of happiness, ultimately Tee's integration with the factitious world of Aunt Beatrice - these shifting perceptions find no resolution, only acknowledgment that coherence will require a mature revaluation of her experience.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Merle Hodge (born 1944) is a Trinidadian novelist and critic. Her 1970 novel Crick Crack, Monkey is a classic of West Indian literature. Merle Hodge was born in 1944, in Curepe, Trinidad, the daughter of an immigration officer. She received both her elementary and high-school education in Trinidad, and as a student of Bishop Anstey High School, she won the Trinidad and Tobago Girls' Island Scholarship in 1962. The scholarship allowed her to attend University College, London, where she pursued studies in French. In 1965 she completed her B.A. Hons. and received a Master of Philosophy degree in 1967, the focus of which concerned the poetry of the French Guyanese writer LEon Damas. Hodge did quite a bit of traveling after obtaining her degree, working as a typist and baby-sitter to make ends meet. She spent much time in France and Denmark but visited many other countries in both Eastern and Western Europe. After returning to Trinidad in the early 1970s, she taught French for a short time at the junior secondary level. She then received a lecturing position in the French Department at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Jamaica. At UWI she also began the pursuit of a Ph.D. in French Caribbean Literature. In 1979 Maurice Bishop became prime minister of Grenada, and Hodge went there to work with the Bishop regime. She was appointed director of the development of curriculum, and it was her job to develop and install a socialist education program. Hodge had to leave Grenada in 1983 because of the execution of Bishop and the resulting U.S. invasion. Hodge is currently working in Women and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad. To date, Merle Hodge has written two novels: Crick Crack, Monkey (1970) and The Life of Laetitia, which was published more than two decades later, in 1993. Hodge's first novel, Crick Crack, Monkey, concerns the conflicts and changes a young girl, Tee, faces as she switches from a rural Trinidadian existence with her Aunt Tantie to an urban, anglicized existence with her Aunt Beatrice. With Tee as narrator, Hodge guides the reader through an intensely personal study of the effects of the colonial imposition of various social and cultural values on the Trinidadian female. Tee recounts the various dilemmas in her life in such a way that it is often difficult to separate the voice of the child, experiencing, from the voice of the woman, reminiscing; in this manner, Hodge broadens the scope of the text considerably. Cultural appropriation, when those who are colonized appropriate the culture of the colonizers, is exemplifed in the story of Crick Crack Monkey. The Life of Laetitia (1993), the story of a young Caribbean girl's first year at school away from home, was well received, one review calling it 'a touching, beautifully written coming-of-age story set in Trinidad'. Hodge has also published various essays concerning life in the Caribbean and the life and works of LEon Damas, including a translation of Damas's collection of poetry, Pigments. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0025 ] Anthony, Michael. All That Glitters. Portsmouth. 1983. Heinemann. 0435980343. Caribbean Writers Series. 202 pages. paperback. CWS 25. Cover photograph by Bill Heyes.
DESCRIPTION - Who has stolen the glittering gold chain? Michael Anthony again returns to Trinidad and to a world of growing up which has enchanted so many in his novels such as THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO. ends up cunningly undoing the traditional detective story. ' - The Observer. a wistfully evocative tale. ' - The Times. much to delight in and much that lingers in the memory.' - British Book News. The richness of the story springs from the boy's gradually changing perception of the adults around him.' - The Financial Times.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - MICHAEL ANTHONY has an exceptional talent for evoking childhood. THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO (CWS 1) is an outstanding example but the other titles are equally sensitive portrayals of growing up in Trinidad. THE GAMES WERE COMING (CWS 17). GREEN DAYS BY THE RIVER (CWS 9) and CRICKET IN THE ROAD (CWS 16) all appear in the Caribbean Writers Series. He has also published STREETS OF CONFLICT, a novel set in Brazil. Michael Anthony was born in Mayaro in 1932. He worked as a moulder in an iron foundry at Pointe. a Pierre, Trinidad, before he went to England in 1955, where he worked in factories, for the railways and as a telegraphist. He then went to Brazil and since returning to Trinidad has written books about the history of Port of Spain and Trinidad. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0026 ] Edgell, Zee. Beka Lamb. London. 1982. Heinemann. 0435984004. Caribbean Writers Series. 171 pages. paperback. CWS26. Cover photography by Armet Francis.
DESCRIPTION - Set in Belize, BEKA LAMB is the record of a few months in the life of Beka and her family. The story of Beka's victory over her habit of lying, which she conquers after deceiving her father about a disgrace at school, is told in flashback. Her reminiscences begin when she wins an essay prize at her convent school, and they stand in lieu of a wake for her friend Toycie. The politics of the small colony, the influence of the matriarchal society and the dominating presence of the Catholic Church are woven into the fabric of the story to provide a compelling portrait of ordinary life in Belize.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Zee Edgell grew up in Belize in the early 1950s. Her first job was as a reporter on the Daily Gleaner in Kingston, Jamaica. From 1966 - 8 she taught at St Catherine Academy in Belize, during which period she was also editor of a small newspaper in Belize City. After travelling widely - apart from Jamaica, Zee Edgell has lived in Britain, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and the USA - she has returned to Belize to teach at St Catherine Academy. She has recently been appointed Director of the Womens' Bureau in Belize. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0027 ] Schwarz-Bart, Simone. The Bridge of Beyond. London. 1987. Heinemann. 0435987704. Caribbean Writers Series. Translated from the French by Barbara Bray. Introduction by Bridget Jones. paperback. CWS27. Cover photograph by Armet Francis.
DESCRIPTION - As I have struggled, others will struggle, and for a long time to come people will know the same moon and the same sun and they will gaze at the same stars, seeing in them, as we do, the eyes of those who have gone before. So speaks Telumee, woman of Guadeloupe, who is the narrator, heroine, and subject of this musical, enchanting novel by a woman from Guadeloupe who has been called "a Creole Colette." Telumee is a peasant, which means she is attached to the land and lives with its rhythms. She is black, which means her ancestors were once slaves and her people are still subject to all the problems of life plus the cruelty of the whites. And she is a woman of her people, which means she must become one of those "negresses with two hearts who understand that the role of a woman is to transform bad into good, sadness into joy." The story Telumee tells is Caribbean in its set- ting, exotic in its colors and swells, dramatic in its violence, passionate in its responses to the challenges of love, and filled with the wisdom of the human heart. These qualities earned the book the highest critical praise and very considerable sales when it was originally published in France. Now, in this vivid English translation, it can speak to Americans, who may experience even greater identification with this new voice from the Antilles.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Simone Schwarz-Bart is the author of six novels and a play, which have been translated and published in many languages; BETWEEN TWO WORLDS and THE BRIDGE OF BEYOND have been published in English. Andre Schwarz-Bart is the author of three novels, including Le Dernier des justes (THE LAST OF THE JUST), which was awarded the 1959 Prix Goncourt and has been translated into twenty languages. Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokurov have previously translated two works by French novelist Patrick Chamoiseau into English: SOLIBO MAGNIFICENT and TEXACO. They translated IN PRAISE OF BLACK WOMEN with Stephanie Daval. Howard Dodson is director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0028 ] Lovelace, Earl. The Wine of Astonishment. Oxford. 1986. Heinemann. 0435988808. Caribbean Writers Series. Introduction by Marjorie Thorpe. 160 pages. paperback. CWS28. Cover design by Keith Pointing. Cover illustration by Christine Tongue.
DESCRIPTION - Bolo is a champion stick fighter, tall, good-looking, the fastest and the strongest and the bravest of all the young men in Bonasse. When, time and time again, he sees his people humiliated by change and American troops his instincts as a leader come to the fore. But the stand he makes takes on bizarre and tragic forms.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Earl Lovelace was born in Trinidad in 1935, and spent his childhood in Tobago and Port of Spain. A collection of his plays, Jestina's Calypso and Other Plays, was published in 1984. His first novel, While Gods Are Falling, was published in 1965 and it was followed by The Schoolmaster (1968). Other works include The Dragon Can't Dance (1979) which is regarded by many critics as his best work, In The Wine of Astonishment (1982) and Salt, published in 1996. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0029 ] Mordecai, Pamela and Morris, Mervyn (editors). Jamaican Woman: An Anthology of Poems. Portsmouth. 1987. Heinemann. 0435986007. Caribbean Writers Series. 448 pages. paperback. CWS 29. Cover illustration: an untitled work by Ras Daniel Hartmann.
DESCRIPTION - Discussing new Jamaican poems we had seen and liked, we found that many were women. Pam suggested the anthology, and, disclaiming chauvinist intentions, asked Mervyn to share in the project. These are some poems we like. Each author is a woman who has not yet published a separate volume of her poems. This anthology, we feel, is accessible anybody in the community of readers. We hope that many of these poems give you pleasure in your contact with things that matter to the poets. That is the point.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Pamela (Pam) Mordecai was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and educated there at Convent of Mercy Alpha Academy. Alpha was one of the first places in the island to develop indigenous theatre and had a strong creative tradition, especially of performance in the arts. At Alpha she acted in many plays, developing an early love for theatre. As a child she played Cobweb in Midsummer Night's Dream, as a teenager, Hecuba in The Trojan Women. In 1960 she went to a small Catholic college for women in Newton, MA., one of a few women of colour. Returning to Jamaica, she taught at high school and then teacher training college. She also worked part-time in TV, hosting shows like "Saturday Magazine" and "Bambu-Tambu" for the Jamaica Information Service, where she met husband (and fellow writer), Martin Mordecai, whom she married in 1966. In 1974 she went to work at the University of the West Indies as Publications Officer in the Faculty of Education. During her time at UWI, she began a writing partnership with the late Grace Walker Gordon that lasted over twenty-five years. She also began a PhD (part-time) on the poetry of Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite that would take her 18 years to finish, every minute of which she enjoyed. Her first publication in 1987 was a book of children's poems, extension reading for Ginn & Company's highly successful Reading 360 Series. In addition to stories and poetry for children, she has written a play, "El Numero Uno," which had its world premiere in Toronto in 2010. Pam and her family emigrated to Canada in 1994. She and Martin live in Kitchener, Ontario. Mervyn Morris (b, 1937) remains one of the most resourceful and technically brilliant of Caribbean poets. After studying at the University College of the West Indies, and winning a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, he embarked on an academic career which would eventually take him back to Mona as a teacher and later Professor of Creative Writing. Alongside his own collections he has written extensively on West Indian literature, and edited various anthologies, as well as the selected poems of Louise Bennett, the iconic Jamaican Creole poet. Miss `Lou'. In 2009 he was awarded Jamaica's Order of Merit. In 2014, he was appointed the first post-independence Poet Laureate of Jamaica. In the Sixties and Seventies he belonged to a small group of young poets who met up in Kingston, reading each other's work, exchanging political and poetic ideas, ambitious for the future and struggling to get noticed and published. Thus most of Morris's literary life has been lived in the post-colonial era of independence and its subsequent political struggles, characterised by tensions and choices between personal and collective commitment which are explored in a variety of ways throughout his work. Despite a keen awareness of continuing injustice, he has always taken a philosophically long view, bound by. smouldering restraint , convinced that discovering or reinventing identity is better than shackling it to a disinterred tragic past. So he is probably less popular with angrier figures, and never writes the big political poem, the propagandist's occasional poem or the slogan-filled doggerel of the uncompromising activist. He often tells painful truths, but without rancour. His poetry eschews obvious historical causes, rather taking up the abiding concerns of all men: sexual desire and spiritual love; mutability and mortality; friendship and betrayal; joy and grief. He is a supreme poet of the everyday, the potency of the familiar with its safety and its limitations, its disappointments and consolations. Many of his poems are shards of personal memory, fragments of autobiography. Like a melancholy comedian, he moves from social observation to fleeting introspection with ironic detachment, his craft and intellect joined in refining language and feeling to tellingly spare effect. His poems of domestic life compel with their familial routines masking deeper frustrations; yet his intimacy avoids sentimentality, pares down the emotional truth, always alive to the ambiguity in close relationships. This is especially revealing in his sequence of poems On Holy Week, where the Crucifixion is flecked with Caribbean colour, and peopled with locals. Turning from sacred to profane, Morris inhabits his amorous verses with intense self-awareness and erotic power, which is to say he writes sexy poems about lust. love, seduction, deception and conquest. And of course he has a fine ear for nuanced shifts from Standard English to Jamaican Creole, transpositions which give locality and music to those poems at once linguistically conscious of their origins yet unconstrained by them. But although he is a serious poet, Morris is also a performer, a wisecracking cynical versifier with a sharp wit and a sparkling gift for ingenious rhymes. He conjures resolution out of tension with satisfying aplomb. In telling his brief narratives he can be a subtle, even sly, master of tiny, wounding reversals. He can also shift from satirical flair to magical reflection with sureness of delicate touch, as in the haiku. Garden':. after a shower/ blackbirds preening on the grass/ dressing for heaven. Complex simplicity, with faint echoes of Blake and Clare, captures a moment of epiphany in this exquisite Franciscan benediction. Mervyn Morris has chosen a dozen poems from his recording specially made for the Archive, and they give some flavour of his marvellous facility and range. The Creole comicality of. Peelin Orange' dissolving into bitter resignation, the surprising epigrammatic depth of. Walk Good' and the wonderful Caribbean Garden of Eden hinted at in. Eve' - these wryly amuse where. Cabal' appals, with its conversational cruelty, a bleak morality tale about cronies and corruption. Among the rest,. Casanova' is a perfect exposure of the vanity and self-delusion mingling in the damaged heart-throb, while. The Day My Father Died' speaks of death's finality and the birth of grief, a new life for the living to bear, especially so for the poet's mother. Morris reads his work beautifully, with memorable clarity, in a warm, richly hued voice, colloquial, declamatory, always attuned to music as well as meaning. The recording was made for The Poetry Archive on September 7th, 2010 at The Audio Workshop, London, and was produced by Richard Carrington. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0030 ] Mais, Roger. Black Lightning. London. 1983. Heinemann. 0435985841. Caribbean Writers Series. Introduction by Jean D.Costa. paperback. CWS30.
DESCRIPTION - The earlier novels of Roger Mais were justly praised for the vivid picture they presented of life in Jamaica and for the lyrical passion of the style in which they were written. His new story is in a different vein and in a different setting. The scene is rural and the figures in it have not suffered much by contact with civilization. But the story is not altogether idyllic. It concerns Jake, a wood carver engaged upon a monumental figure of Samson, and his devoted servants and friends, among them Bess the cook, who is keeping a watchful eye upon her daughter Miriam and Glen the handyman. To supply both chorus and commentator is Amos, an accordion player. There is much quiet humour here masking deep feelings, and Roger Mais again displays his ability for uncovering the secret springs of action and for communicating his compassionate understanding. The mood and tempo of the story change swiftly, working up to a climax during a thunderstorm and reaching a quiet ending in the calm that follows. ROGER MAIS was born at Kingston, Jamaica, in 1905. One of his great-grandfathers was sentenced to the stocks for harbouring runaway slaves. His education was sketchy and unorthodox, but liberal. He is unmarried, and is a painter, as well as a writer, and THE HILLS WERE JOYFUL TOGETHER is his first novel. His recreations are reading, the theatre and music. He says that his most interesting experience was going to jail for six months under Defence Regulations, for writing an article which was considered adverse to the War Effort, but was really only asking for a more liberal constitution (and got it). He wrote this first novel, he says, very quickly, and because he had to;. it had been gestating for years.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Roger Mais (11 August 1905 - 21 June 1955) was a Jamaican journalist, novelist, poet, and playwright. He was born to a middle-class family in Kingston, Jamaica. By 1951, he had won ten first prizes in West Indian literary competitions. His integral role in the development of political and cultural nationalism is evidenced in his being awarded the high honour of the Order of Jamaica in 1978.Roger Mais was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and was educated at Calabar High School. He worked at various times as a photographer, insurance salesman, and journalist, launching his journalistic career as a contributor to the weekly newspaper Public Opinion from 1939 to 1952, which was associated with the People's National Party. He also wrote several plays, reviews, and short stories for the newspaper Focus and the Jamaica Daily Gleaner, concerning his articles with social injustice and inequality. He used this approach to reach his local audience and to primarily push for a national identity and anti-colonialism. Mais published more than a hundred short stories, most being found in Public Opinion and Focus. Other stories are collected in Face and Other Stories and And Most of All Man, published in the 1940s. Mais's play, George William Gordon, was also published in the 1940s, focusing on the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. It played an important role in the rehabilitation of the eponymous character, who was in conventional colonial history described as a rebel and traitor, but who would be proclaimed, on the centenary of the rebellion, a national hero. In 1944, Mais wrote the anti-British satirical tirade 'Now We Know,' criticizing British colonial rule. It resulted in his incarceration of six months in the Spanish Town Penitentiary. This period of imprisonment was instrumental in the development of his first novel, The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953), a work about working-class life in the Kingston of the 1940s. 'Why I Love and Leave Jamaica', an article written in 1950, also stirred many emotions. It labelled the bourgeoisie and the 'philistines' as shallow and criticized their impacting role on art and culture. In addition, Mais's wrote more than thirty stage and radio plays. The plays Masks and Paper Hats and Hurricane were performed in 1943, Atlanta in Calydon in 1950; The Potter's Field was published in Public Opinion (1950) and The First Sacrifice in Focus (1956). Mais left for England in 1952. He lived in London, then in Paris, and for a time in the south of France. He took an alias, Kingsley Croft, and showcased an art exhibition in Paris. His artwork also appeared on the covers of his novels. In 1953, his novel The Hills Were Joyful Together was published by Jonathan Cape in London. Soon afterwards, Brother Man (1954) was published, a sympathetic exploration of the emergent Rastafari movement. Then the following year, Black Lightning was published. While Mais's first two novels had urban settings, Black Lightning (1955) centred on an artist living in the countryside. In 1955 Mais was forced to return to Jamaica after falling ill with cancer; he died that same year in Kingston at the age of 50. His short stories were collected in a volume entitled Listen, The Wind, thirty-two years after his death. Mais's novels have been republished posthumously several times, an indication of his continuing importance to Caribbean literary history. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0031 ] Selvon, Sam. Moses Ascending. Portsmouth. 1984. Heinemann. 0435989529. Caribbean Writers Series. 140 pages. paperback. Cover design by Keith Pointing. Cover illustration by Rosemary Pointing.
DESCRIPTION - The derelict house in Shepherd's Bush that Moses takes on becomes the scene for an hilarious, topsy-turvy irreverent sequence of events. A Black Power group captures the basement, and a van load of illegal Pakistani immigrants move in upstairs, and soon Moses' dreams of proprietorial bliss are brought to an end. The account of his attempts to cope with these and other situations, together with a penchant for earthy, wholesome philosophising make for a vivid, witty and thoroughly enjoyable novel. `The best folk poet the British Caribbean has yet produced'. - George Lamming. 'A simple, lyrical, moving writer' - New Statesman.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samuel Selvon (1923 16 April 1994) was a Trinidad-born writer. Selvon's novel The Lonely Londoners is ground-breaking in its use of creolized English, or. nation language', for narrative as well as dialogue. As he explained:. When I wrote the novel that became The Lonely Londoners, I tried to recapture a certain quality in West Indian everyday life. I had in store a number of wonderful anecdotes and could put them into focus, but I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along.' Samuel Dickson Selvon was born in San Fernando in the south of Trinidad. His parents were East Indian: his father was a first-generation Christian immigrant from Madras and his mother's father was Scottish. He was educated there at Naparima College, San Fernando, before leaving at the age of fifteen to work. He was a wireless operator with the Royal Naval Reserve from 1940 to 1945. Thereafter he moved north to Port of Spain, and from 1945 to 1950, worked for the Trinidad Guardian as a reporter and for a time on its literary page. In this period, he began writing stories and descriptive pieces, mostly under a variety of pseudonyms such as Michael Wentworth, Esses, Ack-Ack and Big Buffer. Selvon moved to London, England, in the 1950s, and then in the late 1970s to Alberta, Canada, where he lived until his death from a heart attack on 16 April 1994 on a return trip to Trinidad. Selvon married twice: in 1947 to Draupadi Persaud (one daughter) and in 1963 to Althea Daroux (two sons, one daughter). Selvon is known for novels such as The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Moses Ascending (1975). His novel A Brighter Sun (1952), detailing the construction of the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway in Trinidad through the eyes of young Indian worker Tiger, was a popular choice on the CXC English Literature syllabus for many years. Other notable works include Ways of Sunlight (1957), Turn Again Tiger (1958) and Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972). During the 1970s and early 1980s, Selvon converted several of his novels and stories into radio scripts, broadcast by the BBC, which were collected in Eldorado West One (Peepal Tree Press, 1988) and Highway in the Sun (Peepal Tree Press, 1991). After moving to Canada, Selvon found a job teaching creative writing as a visiting professor at the University of Victoria. When that job ended, he took a job as a janitor at the University of Calgary in Alberta for a few months, before becoming writer-in-residence there. He was largely ignored by the Canadian literary establishment, with his works receiving no reviews during his residency. The Lonely Londoners, as with most of his later work, focuses on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and the cultural differences that are often subtle and implicit to the dying Empire's fantasy of a. white nation'. Selvon also illustrates the panoply of different. cities' that are lived in London, as with any major city, due to class and racial boundaries. In many ways, his books are the precursors to works such as Some Kind of Black by Diran Adebayo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi. Selvon's papers are now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, USA. These consist of holograph manuscripts, typescripts, book proofs, manuscript notebooks, and correspondence. Drafts for six of his eleven novels are present, along with supporting correspondence and items relating to his career. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0032 ] Lovelace, Earl. Jestina's Calypso and Other Plays. London. 1984. Heinemann. 0435987518. Caribbean Writers Series. 119 pages. paperback. CWS 32. Cover photograph by Armet Francis.
DESCRIPTION - Earl Lovelace's new novels THE WINE OF ASTONISHMENT (CWS 28) and THE DRAGON CAN'T DANCE confirm the promise that showed in THE SCHOOLMASTER (CWS 20) and WHILE GODS ARE FALLING which were originally published in the mid-sixties. The reviewers in London and the Caribbean have reacted with delighted interest. The Financial Times said. His writing is lyrical, reflecting Trinidadian speech habits as well as they have been reflected.' His gift for dialogue is seen again in this collection of plays, JESTINA'S CALYPSO (CWS 32). He was born in Toco, Trinidad in 1935. His first job was as a proof-writer with the Trinidad Publishing Company. He studied at Howard University and was Visiting Novelist at Johns Hopkins. Earl Lovelace's talent for catching the liveliness of the everyday speech of Trinidadians is used to splendid effect in this collection of three plays. In. Jestina's Calypso', a play of pathos and poetry, Jestina's pen-pal is arriving by plane from the USA to marry her. Jestina - ugly, lived in and thirty-nine but beautiful on the inside - hasn't sent her own picture, but beautiful Laura's. The play takes in not only Jestina's personalized tragedy but becomes a paradigm of Trinidad's post-colonial situation. In post-revolution Trinidad, Mr. A. A. Ablack of. The New Hardware Store' prospers while others continue to suffer. With the exception of young Miss Prime, the staff are all disillusioned about their prospects under Mr. Ablack. My Name is Village' is a racy, exciting musical; Earl Lovelace had the whole of his village of Matura in the original production.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Earl Lovelace (born 13 July 1935) is an award-winning Trinidadian novelist, journalist, playwright, and short story writer. He is particularly recognized for his descriptive, dramatic fiction on Trinidadian culture: 'Using Trinidadian dialect patterns and standard English, he probes the paradoxes often inherent in social change as well as the clash between rural and urban cultures.' As Bernardine Evaristo notes, 'Lovelace is unusual among celebrated Caribbean writers in that he has always lived in Trinidad. Most writers leave to find support for their literary endeavours elsewhere and this, arguably, shapes the literature, especially after long periods of exile. But Lovelace's fiction is deeply embedded in Trinidadian society and is written from the perspective of one whose ties to his homeland have never been broken.' Born in Toco, Trinidad and Tobago, Earl Lovelace was sent to live with his grandparents in Tobago at a very young age, but rejoined his family in Toco when he was 11 years old. His family later moved to Belmont, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and then Morvant. Lovelace attended Scarborough Methodist Primary School, Scarborough, Tobago (1940 47), Nelson Street Boys, R.C., Port of Spain (1948), and Ideal High School, Port of Spain (1948 53, where he sat the Cambridge School Certificate). He worked at the Trinidad Guardian as a proofreader from 1953 to 1954, and then for the Department of Forestry (1954-56) and the Ministry of Agriculture (1956 66). He began writing while stationed in the village of Valencia as a forest ranger. In 1962 his first novel, While Gods Are Falling, won the Trinidad and Tobago Independence literary competition sponsored by British Petroleum (BP). From 1966 to 1967, Lovelace studied at Howard University, Washington, DC, and in 1974 he received an MA in English from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, where he was also Visiting Novelist. Winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980, he spent the year as a visiting writer at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He taught at Federal City College (now University of the District of Columbia), Washington, DC (1971-73), and from 1977 to 1987 he lectured in literature and creative writing at the University of the West Indies at St Augustine. He was appointed Writer-in-Residence in England by the London Arts Board (1995-6), a visiting lecturer in the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley College, Massachusetts (1996-97), and was Distinguished Novelist in the Department of English at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington (1999 2004). He is a columnist for the Trinidad Express, and has contributed to a number of periodicals, including Voices, South, and Wasafiri. Based in Trinidad, while teaching and touring various countries, he was appointed to the Board of Governors of the University of Trinidad and Tobago in 2005, the year his 70th birthday was honoured with a conference and celebrations at the University of the West Indies. Lovelace is the subject of a 2014 documentary film by Funso Aiyejina entitled A Writer In His Place. Lovelace has three daughters and two sons. His artist son Che Lovelace illustrated the jacket of the 1997 US edition of his novel Salt. Earl Lovelace collaborated with his filmmaker daughter Asha Lovelace on writing the film Joebell and America, based on his short story of the same title. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0033 ] Rhys, Jean. Tales of the Wide Caribbean: A New Collection of Short Stories. London. 1985. Heinemann. 0435987496. Caribbean Writers Series. Introduction by Jean D.Costa. 180 pages. paperback. CWS33.
DESCRIPTION - Meticulous in their construction, mesmerising in their effect, these stories transport the reader to early 20th century Dominica beautifully capturing the language of the local inhabitants as well as remembrances of an extraordinary girlhood. This collection of stories and autobiographical sketches, focused on her Caribbean homeland, were published six years after the death of Jean Rhys. Some of these pieces have been published previously in literary journals and some are published here for the first time.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jean Rhys (August 24, 1890 - May 14, 1979), born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, was a Caribbean novelist who wrote in the mid twentieth century. Her first four novels were published during the 1920s and 1930s, but it was not until the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966, that she emerged as a significant literary figure. At the age of 76, her "prequel" to Charlotte Bront 's Jane Eyre won a prestigious WH Smith Literary Award in 1967, and the Heinemann Award. Rhys's Creole heritage, her experiences as a white Creole woman, both in the Caribbean and in England, influenced her life and writing. Her fiction was autobiographical in nature, often dealing with the theme of a helpless female, an outsider, who is victimized by her dependence on an older man for support and protection. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0034 ] Glissant, Edouard. The Ripening. Kingston. 1985. Heinemann. 0435982222. Winner Of The Prix Renaudot. Translated from the French by Michael Dash. Caribbean Writers Series. 195 pages. paperback. CWS34. Cover illustration by George Rodney. SHAW546.
DESCRIPTION - This extraordinary novel tells the story of the rise to political maturity of eight young Martinicans, and their plans to stage a political murder. Concerned for the justice of the forthcoming elections, they fix upon a government agent who stands in the way of the people. They determine to kill him and, as their instrument, they choose Thael, an unsophisticated shepherd from the hills. THE RIPENING is set in Martinique, on a rich landscape full of life and death. It is one of the most accomplished works by any French Caribbean writer. Edouard Glissant was born in 1928 in Martinique, and is well known as a poet, and a novelist. THE RIPENING won the Prix Renaudot on its first publication in 1958.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edouard Glissant (21 September 1928 - 3 February 2011) was a Martinican writer, poet and literary critic. He is widely recognised as one of the most influential figures in Caribbean thought and cultural commentary. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0035 ] St. Omer, Garth. The Lights on the Hill. Portsmouth. 1986. Heinemann. 0435989642. Caribbean Writers Series. 1st Novel. 119 pages. paperback. CWS 35. Cover design by Keith Pointing. Cover illustration by Peter Melnyczuk.
DESCRIPTION - Stephenson is in his thirties, average and unhappy. He has lost a job, stumbled through several affairs - more coincidental than passionate - and when golden opportunities fall into his lap, finds he is incapable of taking control of his own life. As the divisions of past, present, and future fuse together, Stephenson's dilemma takes on universal significance - the perpetual struggle of man with his own passivity. Garth St. Omer's elegant and economical prose allows him to create the most telling effects with apparent ease. THE LIGHTS ON THE HILL is one of the great achievements of West Indian literature.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Garth St. Omer was born in Castries, St Lucia, on 15 January 1931. On graduating from St Mary's College, a Roman Catholic high school for boys in St Lucia, he taught for seven years, 1949 - 56, in high schools in the Eastern Caribbean. He entered the University College of the West Indies, Jamaica, in 1956 on a UCWI scholarship, and graduated in 1959 with an Honours degree in French, with Spanish as subsidiary subject. Between 1959 and 1961 he taught as an English Language Assistant in lycees in Dax and Albi, France. From 1961 to 1966 he taught French and English at Apam Secondary School, Ghana. The years 1966 to 1969 were devoted to full-time writing of fiction, in England and the West Indies. In 1969 he entered the graduate school of Fine Arts of Columbia University, taking courses in creative writing, translation, film-making, film history and film aesthetics. He graduated in 1971 with the MFA degree. In 1971 he enrolled in the Comparative Literature programme of Princeton University to read for the PhD degree. He successfully completed the requirements in 1975, his dissertation being on THE COLONIAL NOVEL, a comparative study of Albert Camus, V. S. Naipaul and Alejo Carpentier (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms, 1975). In 1975 he joined the English Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara, as Associate Professor, and was subsequently promoted to the rank of full Professor. His awards include a Writing Grant from the Arts Council, London, England (1967), a Columbia University fellowship (1969 - 71), a Ford Foundation fellowship (1969 - 73), and a Princeton University fellowship (1971 - 75). |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0036 ] Noel, Keith (editor). Caribbean Plays for Playing. London. 1985. Heinemann. 0435986473. Caribbean Writers Series. paperback. CWS36.
DESCRIPTION -
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Keith Noel is an educator. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0037 ] Gilroy, Beryl. Frangipani House. London. 1986. Heinemann. 0435988522. Prize winner in the GLC Black Literature Competition. Caribbean Writers Series. 111 pages. paperback. CWS37. Cover illustration by Ramo Avella. Cover design by Keith Pointing.
DESCRIPTION - FRANGIPANI HOUSE, Beryl Gilroy's first novel, won a prize in the GLC Black Literature Competition even before it was published. Set in Guyana, it is the story of Mama King, trapped by age and infirmity, but ultimately indomitable. She becomes too much for her family who send her away to Frangipani House, a dreary claustrophobic rest home - but Mama King does not give in. She makes her mark - first-through anguish, then near madness, and finally by escape to the dangerous, dirty, vital world of the poor. FRANGIPANI HOUSE is a beautifully written protest at institutions that isolate, and a way of life that denies respect and responsibility for the weak.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Beryl Agatha Gilroy (nee Answick) (30 August 1924 - 4 April 2001) was a novelist and teacher, and. one of Britain's most significant post-war Caribbean migrants'. Born in what was then British Guiana (now Guyana), she moved in the 1950s to the United Kingdom, where she became the first black headteacher in London. She was the mother of academic Paul Gilroy. Beryl Gilroy was born in Skeldon, Berbice, Guyana. She grew up in a large, extended family, largely under the influence of her maternal grandmother, Sally Louisa James (1868 1967), a herbalist, manager of the family small-holding, keen reader, imparter to the young Beryl of the stories of. Long Bubbies', Cabresses and Long Lady and a treasury of colloquial proverbs. Gilroy did not enter full-time schooling until she was twelve. From 1943 to 1945, she attended teacher training college in Georgetown, gaining a first-class diploma. She subsequently taught and lectured on a Unicef nutrition programme. In 1951, at the age of 27, she was selected to attend university in the United Kingdom. Between 1951 and 1953 she attended the University of London pursuing a Diploma in Child Development. Although Gilroy was a qualified teacher, racism prevented her getting a post for some time, and she had to work as a washer, a factory clerk and maid. She taught for a couple of years, married and spent the next twelve years at home bringing up and educating her children, furthering her own higher education, reviewing and reading for a publisher. In 1968 she returned to teaching and eventually became the first Black headteacher in London. Her experiences of those years are told in Black Teacher (1976). Later she worked as a researcher at the Institute of Education, University of London, and developed a pioneering practice in psychotherapy, working mainly with Black women and children. She gained a PhD in counselling psychology from an American university in 1987 while working at the Institute of Education. In 2000 she was also awarded an honorary doctorate from the Institute. in recognition of her services to education'. She died of a heart attack at the age of 76 on 4 April 2001. As noted by Roxann Bradshaw:. Two days later over one hundred Anglopjone women writers from around the world gathered at Goldsmith College in London, where Dr Gilroy had been scheduled to deliver a keynote address at the 4th annual Caribbean Women Writers Association conference. The news of her death was received with great sorrow for the passing of one of the first wave of Anglophone women writers, whose contribution to Caribbean women's literature is invaluable.' An orange skirt suit worn by Beryl Gilroy was included in an exhibition entitled Black British Style at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2004. Gilroy's creative writing began in childhood, as a teacher for children and then in the 1960s when she began writing what was later published by Peepal Tree Press as In Praise of Love and Children. Between 1970 and 1975 she wrote the pioneering children's series Nippers, which contain probably the first reflection of the Black British presence in UK writing for children. It was not until 1986 that her first novel, the award-winning Frangipani House was published (Heinemann). It won a GLC Creative Writing Prize in 1982. Set in an old person's home in Guyana, it reflects one of her professional concerns: the position of ethnic minority elders and her persistent emphasis on the drive for human freedom. Boy Sandwich (Heinemann) was published in 1989, followed by Stedman and Joanna: A Love in Bondage (Vantage, 1991), and a collection of poems, Echoes and Voices (Vantage, 1991). Then came Sunlight and Sweet Water (Peepal Tree, 1994), Gather the Faces, In Praise of Love and Children and Inkle and Yarico (all Peepal Tree, 1994). Her last novel, The Green Grass Tango (Peepal Tree) was published in 2001, sadly after Beryl Gilroy's death in April of that year. Gilroy's early work examined the impact of life in Britain on West Indian families and her later work explored issues of African and Caribbean diaspora and slavery. In 1998, a collection of her non-fiction writing, entitled Leaves in the Wind, came out from Mango Publishing. It included her lectures, notes, essays, dissertations and personal reviews. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0038 ] Bascom, Harold. Apata: The Story of a Reluctant Criminal. London. 1986. Heinemann. 043598828x. Caribbean Writers Series. 279 pages. paperback. Cover design by Keith Pointing. Cover illustration by Paul Wearing.
DESCRIPTION - In 1959, the year Queen Elizabeth visited the country newspapers in British Guiana reported a manhunt taking place deep within the forest. APATA is an imaginative reconstruction of the life of the man at its centre, a charismatic young Guianese whose hopes of a brilliant future are frustrated by the colour of his skin. Despite his obvious abilities, he cannot complete his education, and is forced instead to take up ignominious work for Glenn, a white homosexual trader. Trapped by a system of prejudices, and deeply humiliated, Apata is pushed into a cycle of crime that leads to the life of a fugitive, and a grisly demise. Harold Bascom's APATA is the story of victims and outcasts everywhere, a gripping adventure that confronts a confusing and hurtful period when different cultures collided.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - HAROLD A. BASCOM was born in Vergenoegen, Guyana, in 1951, and began writing poetry in his teens. He made his first break as a writer of prose in 1977, when some of his short stories were read on national radio. He also began writing children's books and finished his first film script, a story based on a manhunt for the desperado Clement Cuffy, which took place in British Guiana in 1959, and which gave rise to a full length novel - APATA. Harold A. Bascom works as a graphic artist and book illustrator and lives in Georgetown, Guyana. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0039 ] Ladoo, Harold Sonny. No Pain Like This Body. London. 1987. Heinemann. 0435988743. Caribbean Writers Series. 141 pages. paperback. Cover design by Keith Pointing. Cover illustration by Janet Milner.
DESCRIPTION - Set in a Hindu community in the Eastern Caribbean, NO PAIN LIKE THIS BODY is one of the most distinctive, powerful novels in the Caribbean Writers Series. In vivid unsentimental prose, it describes the life of a poor rice-growing family during the August rainy season. Their struggle to cope with illness, a drunken and unpredictable father, and the violence of the elements, is set against a sharply drawn village community. With brilliant economy and originality, Ladoo creates a surreal, terrifying world in which the struggle to survive engenders a courageous, almost religious, relationship with fate. Harold Sonny Ladoo was born and brought up in Trinidad. Like many writers of his generation, he went abroad, emigrating to Canada where he published No Pain Like This Body and Yesterdays. The considerable vigour and promise evident in these two novels and in his other short stories was cut short by his tragic early death, when he was only 28.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Harold Sonny Ladoo (1945-1973) was a Caribbean novelist and author of two books documenting the struggles of living in poverty in the Hindu communities of Trinidad and Tobago. Ladoo was born and grew up in an environment much like the world of his novels. He was born in Trinidad into extreme poverty and immigrated to Toronto, Canada, with his wife and son in 1968 to study English at the University of Toronto. It was during this time that he wrote his first and most notable novel, No Pain Like This body, published in 1972. The novel is a vivid story of a young boy growing up in a small Caribbean rice-growing community. It focuses on the day-to-day struggles of a single family through illness, storm, and violence during the August rainy season. The writing is raw and often na ve yet manages to create a visceral experience. His second book, Yesterdays, was a much more upbeat book about a young man attempting to launch a Hindu Mission to Canada. Ladoo's third book was intended to be the last part of a trilogy; however, in 1973, while on a visit home to his Calcutta Settlement, he was mysteriously killed and his body was found on the side of a road in Trinidad. The University of Toronto Mississauga campus (formerly Erindale College), offers to students The Harold Sonny Ladoo Book Prize for Creative Writing ever year. |
![]() | ![]() | Jones, Evan. Stone Haven. London. 0. Heinemann. 0435989499. Caribbean Writers Series. 254 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - A beautiful young Quaker missionary, arriving in Jamaica in 1920to teach at Happy Grove School, defies her family's colour prejudice and marries a prospering local planter. Stone Haven is the house he builds for her; a house on a hill, looking out over the lush green landscape to the sea. Through family crises and political upheavals, Grace attempts to steer a steady course.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Evan Jones was born in Portland, Jamaica in 1927. Other works include Tales of the Caribbean: Anansi Stories 1984; Tales of the Caribbean: Witches and Duppies, 1984; Tales of the Caribbean: The Beginning of Things, 1984; Skylarking, 1993. |
![]() | ![]() | Adisa, Opal Palmer. It Begins With Tears. Portsmouth. 1977. Heinemann. 0435989464. Caribbean Writers Series. PEN award-winner Opal Palmer Adisa s first novel. 239 pages. paperback. Cover illustration by David Bridgeman.
DESCRIPTION - When the seductive Monica returns to her village, she wants to make a new start. But Kristoff village, set in the heart of rural Jamaica, is about to become a whirlpool of emotion. Every encounter with Monica stirs up women's dissatisfactions and men's desires. When those emotions develop into hatred and jealousy, Monica is made to pay for what she has done. In this novel Opal Palmer Adisa brings to life a whole community and writes with understanding and compassion about the frailties of its inhabitants. Drawing on Jamaican folklore, she shows what is at the heart of village life, and how that life can be sustained.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Opal Palmer Adisa (born 1954) is a Jamaica-born award-winning poet, novelist, performance artist and educator. Anthologised in over 100 publications, she has been a regular performer of her work internationally. She was raised ten miles outside Kingston, Jamaica, and attended school in the capital. In 1970 she went to study at Hunter College, New York, and in 1979 moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to pursue an MA in creative writing. As noted by David Katz,. Adisa's work has been greatly informed by her childhood experience of life on a sugar estate in the Jamaican countryside, where her father worked as a chemist and her mother as a bookkeeper. It was in this setting that young Opal was introduced not only to the art of storytelling, but also, after her parents divorced, to the ceaseless oppression faced by women and the ongoing injustices heaped on the poor. Such formative experiences, coupled with her mother's efforts to improve the lives of those around her, gave Adisa the desire to. give voice to the voiceless' at an early age.' Since 1993, Opal Palmer Adisa has taught literature and served as Chair of the Ethnic Studies/Cultural Diversity Program at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. Dr. Adisa has two masters degrees from San Francisco State University, and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. She has previously taught undergraduate and graduate courses at California College of the Arts, Stanford University, University of Berkeley, and San Francisco State University. In the spring of 2010, she became a member of the teaching staff at the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI), St Croix Campus, and also served as editor of The Caribbean Writer, UVI's famous journal of Caribbean literature, for 2 years. An important element of her poetry is the use of nation language, about which she has said:. I have to credit [Louise] Bennett for granting me permission, so to speak, to write in Nation Language, because it was her usage that allowed me to see the beauty of our language. Moreover, there are just some things that don't have the same sense of intimacy or color if not said in Nation language. I use nation language when it is the only way and the best way to get my point across, to say what I mean from the center of my navel. But I also use it, to interrupt and disrupt standard English as s reminder to myself that I have another tongue, but also to jolt readers to listen and read more carefully, to glean from the language the Caribbean sensibilities that I am always pushing, sometimes subtly, other times more forcefully. Nation language allows me to infuse the poem with all of the smells and colors of home.' |
![]() | ![]() | Anderson, Vernon F. Sudden Glory. London. 1987. Heinemann. 0435988085. Caribbean Writers Series. 274 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - SUDDEN GLORY, published here for the first time, is a rich and absorbing novel in the finest tradition of Latin American writing. Set in Guatemala, it tells of a team of archaeologists who come to study Mayan ruins. Enveloped in the forest, they confront an unfamiliar, violent world, which cuts them off from civilization and brings them face to face with a terrible and profound crisis. With frightening inevitability the mask of the Totonacs, a psychologist's encounter with insanity, and Karen Farr's prescription of 'sudden glory' insidiously take over, and in the search for a kind of truth, their world begins to split apart. Anderson handles a large and diverse cast of characters and skillfully weaves together myth, reality and folklore to create a haunting, magical study of the human condition that has been compared with the great works of Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Vernon F. Anderson was born in Jamaica in 1900. After displaying an early aptitude and interest in medicine, he was sent to London to train as a doctor, and studied at Kings College, University of London and Westminster Hospital Medical School. In 1928, he applied for a post in the British Colonial Civil Service and was sent as a medical officer to British Honduras, where he went on to head the medical division. To diversify, he also studied public health and tropical medicine, and spent time in Greece and Albania, examining how the respective governments coped with malaria. In 1946, Dr Anderson represented the Belize government in his home country, helping to plan the University of the West Indies. On retirement from government services in Belize, he was awarded an OBE in recognition of his work. He returned to Jamaica and set up a private practice, in which he continued working until 1971. SUDDEN GLORY is his only novel, inspired by his work in medicine, his growing interest in the literature signifying the. coming of age' of Jamaica, and a quote by the seventeenth century English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes,. Laughter is a passion without name, it is a Sudden Glory.' |
![]() | ![]() | Warner-Vieyra, Myriam. Juletane. Portsmouth. 1987. Heinemann. 0435989782. Caribbean Writers Series. Translated from the French by Betty Wilson. 80 pages. paperback. Cover illustrationn by Robin Harris. Cover design by Keith Pointing.
DESCRIPTION - When Helene is packing up her belongings in readiness for her imminent move and marriage, she unearths a faded old exercise book. As she reads she cannot anticipate the effect it will have upon her own future. It is the diary of Juletane, a young West Indian woman. Written over three weeks, it records her short life; her lonely childhood in France, her marriage to an African student, and her eager return, with him, to Africa - the land of her ancestors. In stark contrast to her naive illusions, the social realities of traditional Muslim life and their cultural demands on her as a woman threaten to drive her to unendurable extremes of loneliness and complete alienation. She is a foreigner, in spite of the colour of her skin. In this powerful and moving novel, Myriam Warner-Vieyra portrays with great sensitivity the complexities of cross-cultural relationships and, in particular, the female predicament.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Myriam Warner-Vieyra was born in Pointe- -Pitre in 1939. She spent a large part of her childhood with her grandmother in Guadeloupe. She then went to live in France, where she finished her secondary education and afterwards attended the University of Dakar, where she obtained a librarian's diploma. She married the film-maker Paulin Vieyra and she has lived in Senegal for thirty years. She is a librarian and has three adult children (in 1992). |
![]() | ![]() | Belgrave, Valerie. Ti Marie. New York. 1988. Heinemann. 0435988301. Caribbean Writers Series. An original paperback. 278 pages. paperback. Cover design by Keith Pointing. Cover illustration: a batik picture by Valerie Belgrave.
DESCRIPTION - The eighteenth century is drawing to a close. The Caribbean is a pawn in the power games of European empires, and long-neglected Trinidad gains a new importance. Racial and political conflicts intensify, and violence is in the very air. Yet, against the encroaching evil there is love - of family, of friends and, for Elena, of a restless, reckless young English nobleman, seeking his destiny in exile. But their union is threatened by prejudice of colour and of class. Valerie Belgrave has vividly recreated a crucial time in Caribbean and world history - where the old order is changing and the struggle echoes down to the present day. With the epic sweep of GONE WITH THE WIND this enthralling, many-layered novel ranges from a West Indies in turmoil to an England of elegance and depravity and involves us in the fate of settler and slave, republican and aristocrat and the perfection of human love.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Valerie Begrave (1949-2016) grew up in Trinidad and studied at Sir George Williams (Concordia) University in Canada, obtaining a BA in Painting and Literature. She lived in Trinidad, where she worked as an artist and fabric designer specializing in batik. Belgrave was also a social activist and was among hundreds of students who staged a sit-in at the computer lab on the ninth floor of the Sir George Williams University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in 1969 to protest against a professor who was accused of racism. |
![]() | ![]() | Conde, Maryse. A Season in Rihata. New York. 1988. Heinemann. 0435988328. Translated from the French by Richard Philcox. Heinemann Caribbean Writers Series. 192 pages. paperback. Cover design by Keith Pointing. Cover photography by H. Elleing. Cover illustration by Rachel Ross.
DESCRIPTION - In Rihata, a small, sleepy, backwater town in a fictitious African state, a couple and their family struggle to come to terms with each other against a background of political maneuvering and upheaval. Marie-Helene, far from her native home in Guadeloupe, lives unhappily with her African husband, Zek, who is riddled with material problems and weighted down by his own burden of inferiority towards his younger and more successful brother, Madou. Their uneasy existence is further disturbed by the arrival of Madou, now Minister for Rural Development, on an official visit to Rihata. Murky events from the past resurface and send ripples through their lives. The portrait of an African community torn between progress and tradition and subject to the whims of a dictatorship unfolds through this subtle web of personal relationships. A SEASON IN RIHATA is a novel of political power, exile, grief and loneliness.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Maryse Conde (born February 11, 1937) is a Guadeloupean, French-language author of historical fiction, best known for her novel Segu (1984 1985). Born as Maryse Boucolon at Pointe- -Pitre, Guadeloupe, she was the youngest of eight children. After having graduated from high school, she was sent to Lycee Fenelon and Sorbonne in Paris, where she majored in English. In 1959, she married Mamadou Conde, a Guinean actor. After graduating, she taught in Guinea, Ghana and Senegal. In 1981, she divorced, but the following year married Richard Philcox, English language translator of most of her novels. In addition to her writings, Conde had a distinguished academic career. In 2004 she retired from Columbia University as Professor Emerita of French. She had previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA, the Sorbonne, The University of Virginia, and the University of Nanterre. Conde's novels explore racial, gender and cultural issues in a variety of historical eras and locales, including the Salem witch trials in I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1992) and the 19th-century Bambara Empire of Mali in Segu (1987). Her novels trace the relationships between African peoples and the diaspora, especially the Caribbean. She has taken considerable distance from most Caribbean literary movements, such as Negritude and Creolite, and has often focused on topics with strong feminist concerns. A radical activist in her work as well as in her personal life, Conde has admitted:. I could not write anything. unless it has a certain political significance. I have nothing else to offer that remains important.' Her recent writings have become increasingly autobiographical, such as Memories of My Childhood and Victoire, a biography of her grandmother. Who Slashed Celanire's Throat also shows traces of Conde's paternal great-grandmother. |
![]() | ![]() | Lovelace, Earl. A Brief Conversation and Other Stories. Portsmouth. 1988. Heinemann. 0435988824. Caribbean Writers Series. A paperback original. 141 pages. paperback. Cover design by Keith Pointing. Cover illustration by Christine Tongue.
DESCRIPTION - A rich and entertaining new collection of short stories from Trinidad's foremost story-teller. With the characteristic skill now expected from this writer of international repute, Earl Lovelace paints a sensitive, compassionate and often humorous portrait of everyday Trinidad life. Ordinary people like Victory the barber, Shoemaker Arnold, Miss Ross - once the most sought after woman in Cunaripo - Blues and Joebell, both ambitious to see new lands, are invested with a special magic that draws the reader into a rhythmical, colourful and changing world. His writing is lyrical, reflecting Trinidadian speech habits as well as they have ever been reflected.' - Financial Times.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Earl Lovelace (born 13 July 1935) is an award-winning Trinidadian novelist, journalist, playwright, and short story writer. He is particularly recognized for his descriptive, dramatic fiction on Trinidadian culture: 'Using Trinidadian dialect patterns and standard English, he probes the paradoxes often inherent in social change as well as the clash between rural and urban cultures.' As Bernardine Evaristo notes, 'Lovelace is unusual among celebrated Caribbean writers in that he has always lived in Trinidad. Most writers leave to find support for their literary endeavours elsewhere and this, arguably, shapes the literature, especially after long periods of exile. But Lovelace's fiction is deeply embedded in Trinidadian society and is written from the perspective of one whose ties to his homeland have never been broken.' Born in Toco, Trinidad and Tobago, Earl Lovelace was sent to live with his grandparents in Tobago at a very young age, but rejoined his family in Toco when he was 11 years old. His family later moved to Belmont, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and then Morvant. Lovelace attended Scarborough Methodist Primary School, Scarborough, Tobago (1940 47), Nelson Street Boys, R.C., Port of Spain (1948), and Ideal High School, Port of Spain (1948 53, where he sat the Cambridge School Certificate). He worked at the Trinidad Guardian as a proofreader from 1953 to 1954, and then for the Department of Forestry (1954-56) and the Ministry of Agriculture (1956 66). He began writing while stationed in the village of Valencia as a forest ranger. In 1962 his first novel, While Gods Are Falling, won the Trinidad and Tobago Independence literary competition sponsored by British Petroleum (BP). From 1966 to 1967, Lovelace studied at Howard University, Washington, DC, and in 1974 he received an MA in English from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, where he was also Visiting Novelist. Winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980, he spent the year as a visiting writer at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He taught at Federal City College (now University of the District of Columbia), Washington, DC (1971-73), and from 1977 to 1987 he lectured in literature and creative writing at the University of the West Indies at St Augustine. He was appointed Writer-in-Residence in England by the London Arts Board (1995-6), a visiting lecturer in the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley College, Massachusetts (1996-97), and was Distinguished Novelist in the Department of English at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington (1999 2004). He is a columnist for the Trinidad Express, and has contributed to a number of periodicals, including Voices, South, and Wasafiri. Based in Trinidad, while teaching and touring various countries, he was appointed to the Board of Governors of the University of Trinidad and Tobago in 2005, the year his 70th birthday was honoured with a conference and celebrations at the University of the West Indies. Lovelace is the subject of a 2014 documentary film by Funso Aiyejina entitled A Writer In His Place. Lovelace has three daughters and two sons. His artist son Che Lovelace illustrated the jacket of the 1997 US edition of his novel Salt. Earl Lovelace collaborated with his filmmaker daughter Asha Lovelace on writing the film Joebell and America, based on his short story of the same title. |
![]() | ![]() | Philip, Marlene Nourbese. Harriet s Daughter. Portsmouth. 1988. Heinemann. 0435989243. Caribbean Writers Series. A paperback original. 150 pages. paperback. Cover design by Keith Pointing. Cover illustration by Colin Williams.
DESCRIPTION - Harriet Tubman was brave and strong, and she was black like me. I think it was the first time I thought of wanting to be called Harriet - I wanted to be Harriet.' Margaret is determined to be someone; to be cool, with style and class and to have a blacker skin. More than anything else she wants to help her best friend, Zulma, escape from Canada and fly back to Tobago to live with her grandmother. She compiles a list:. Things I want changed in my life' and sets about achieving her objectives. But at fourteen, coming to terms with growing-up, relationships and responsibilities is not quite so straightforward, and the parental threat of. Good West Indian Discipline' is never far removed. In this charming, humorous and perceptive tale of adolescence, Marlene Nourbese Philip explores the friendship of two young black girls and throws into sharp relief the wider issues of culture and identity so relevant to teenagers of all races and colours.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Marlene Nourbese Philip (born 3 February 1947), usually credited as M. NourbeSe Philip, is a Canadian poet, novelist, playwright, essayist and short story writer. Born in the Caribbean Woodlands, Moriah, Trinidad and Tobago, Philip was educated at the University of the West Indies. She subsequently pursued graduate degrees in political science and law at the University of Western Ontario, and practised law in Toronto, Ontario for seven years. She left her law practice in 1983 to devote time to her writing. Philip is known for experimentation with literary form and for her commitment to social justice. Though her writing suggests an in-depth understanding of the canon, Philip's career undoubtedly helped to free her from the constraints of tradition and to nurture her social analysis and criticism. Philip has published three books of poetry, two novels, three books of collected essays and two plays. Her short stories, essays, reviews and articles have appeared in magazines and journals in North America and England and her poetry has been extensively anthologized. Her work - poetry, fiction and non-fiction is taught widely at the university level and is the subject of much academic writing and critique. Her first novel, Harriet's Daughter (1988), is widely used in high school curricula in Ontario, Great Britain and was, for a decade, studied by all children in the Caribbean receiving a high school CXC diploma. It has also been published as an audio cassette, a script for stage and a German language edition. Although categorized as young adult literature, Harriet's Daughter is a book that can appeal to older children and adults of all ages. Set in Toronto, this novel explores the themes of friendship, self-image, ethics and migration while telling a story that is riveting, funny and technically accomplished. It makes the fact of being Black a very positive and enhancing experience. Philip's most renowned poetry book, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, was awarded the Casa de las AmEricas Prize for Literature while still in manuscript form. As she explores themes of race, place, gender, colonialism and, always, language, Philip plays with words, bending and restating them in a way that is reminiscent of jazz. The tension between father tongue (the white Euro-Christian male canon), and mother tongue (Black African female) is always present. Philip is a prolific essayist. Her articles and essays demonstrate a persistent critique and an impassioned concern for issues of social justice and equity in the arts, prompting Selwyn R. Cudjoe's assertion that Philip. serves as a lightning rod of black cultural defiance of the Canadian mainstream.' More to the point is the epigram in Frontiers where Philip dedicates the book to Canada, 'in the effort of becoming a space of true belonging'. It is as an essayist that M. NourbeSe Philip's role as anti-racist activist is most evident. She was one of the first to make culture her primary focus as she argued passionately and articulately for social justice and equity. Specific controversial events that have been the focus of her essays include the Into the Heart of Africa exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, the Toronto production of Show Boat, and Caribana. Her essays also put the spotlight on racial representation on arts councils and committees in Canada and there have been definite advances in this area subsequently. It was at a small demonstration concerning the lack of Canadian writers of colour outside of the 1989 PEN Canada gala, that she was confronted by June Callwood. Philip has also taught at the University of Toronto, taught creative fiction at the third year level at York University and has been writer in residence at McMaster University and University of Windsor. Her most recent work, Zong! (2008), is based on a legal decision at the end of the eighteenth century, related to the notorious murder of Africans on board a slave ship. A dramatized reading of this new poem cycle, was workshopped and presented at Harbourfront in Toronto as part of rock.paper.sistahz in 2006. Poems from this collection have been published in Facture, boundary 2 and Fascicle; the later includes four poems, along with an extensive introduction. On April 16, 2012 at b current studio space in Toronto, Philip held her first authorial full-length reading of Zong!-- an innovative interaction-piece lasting seven hours in which both author and audience performed a cacophonous collective reading of the work from beginning to end. In solidarity with this collective reading, another audience-performance was held in Blomfontaine, South Africa. In talking about her own work Philip has said,. fiction is about telling lies, but you must be scathingly honest in telling those lies. Poetry is about truth telling, but you need the lie - the artifice of the form to tell those truths.' Scholar Rinaldo Walcott has engaged critically with the work of M. NourbeSe Philip. His essay. 'No Language is Neutral': The Politics of Performativity in M. Nourbese Philip's and Dionne Brand's Poetry' in the book Black Like Who? is a strong example of this scholarly engagement. |
![]() | ![]() | Gilroy, Beryl. Boy-Sandwich. Oxford. 1989. Heinemann. 0435988107. Caribbean Writers Series. 122 pages. paperback. Cover design by Keith Pointing. Cover illustration by Brian Bolger.
DESCRIPTION - As a black child, born in present-day London, Tyrone has always been encircled by the loving arms of his family, keeping him safe, sandwiched-in. But this secure world begins to fragment when his grandparents are evicted to an institution. Its callousness and cupidity make it a mockery of. home,' and for the old people Tyrone is the only lifeline. When a horrifying act of violence shatters the heart of a black community the bread turns stale. What encloses Tyrone now is fear, confusion, frustration. Family ties begin to chafe - he feels an insistent need to find and assert his own identity. Could some kind of answer lie in the far-off island that had nurtured his parents and grandparents? Beryl Gilroy has drawn deeply on her personal and professional experience. As a sequel to FRANGIPANI HOUSE this is a story that recognises human differences - in age, in race, in history, in place - and triumphantly transcends them.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Beryl Agatha Gilroy (nee Answick) (30 August 1924 - 4 April 2001) was a novelist and teacher, and. one of Britain's most significant post-war Caribbean migrants'. Born in what was then British Guiana (now Guyana), she moved in the 1950s to the United Kingdom, where she became the first black headteacher in London. She was the mother of academic Paul Gilroy. Beryl Gilroy was born in Skeldon, Berbice, Guyana. She grew up in a large, extended family, largely under the influence of her maternal grandmother, Sally Louisa James (1868 1967), a herbalist, manager of the family small-holding, keen reader, imparter to the young Beryl of the stories of. Long Bubbies', Cabresses and Long Lady and a treasury of colloquial proverbs. Gilroy did not enter full-time schooling until she was twelve. From 1943 to 1945, she attended teacher training college in Georgetown, gaining a first-class diploma. She subsequently taught and lectured on a Unicef nutrition programme. In 1951, at the age of 27, she was selected to attend university in the United Kingdom. Between 1951 and 1953 she attended the University of London pursuing a Diploma in Child Development. Although Gilroy was a qualified teacher, racism prevented her getting a post for some time, and she had to work as a washer, a factory clerk and maid. She taught for a couple of years, married and spent the next twelve years at home bringing up and educating her children, furthering her own higher education, reviewing and reading for a publisher. In 1968 she returned to teaching and eventually became the first Black headteacher in London. Her experiences of those years are told in Black Teacher (1976). Later she worked as a researcher at the Institute of Education, University of London, and developed a pioneering practice in psychotherapy, working mainly with Black women and children. She gained a PhD in counselling psychology from an American university in 1987 while working at the Institute of Education. In 2000 she was also awarded an honorary doctorate from the Institute. in recognition of her services to education'. She died of a heart attack at the age of 76 on 4 April 2001. As noted by Roxann Bradshaw:. Two days later over one hundred Anglopjone women writers from around the world gathered at Goldsmith College in London, where Dr Gilroy had been scheduled to deliver a keynote address at the 4th annual Caribbean Women Writers Association conference. The news of her death was received with great sorrow for the passing of one of the first wave of Anglophone women writers, whose contribution to Caribbean women's literature is invaluable.' An orange skirt suit worn by Beryl Gilroy was included in an exhibition entitled Black British Style at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2004. Gilroy's creative writing began in childhood, as a teacher for children and then in the 1960s when she began writing what was later published by Peepal Tree Press as In Praise of Love and Children. Between 1970 and 1975 she wrote the pioneering children's series Nippers, which contain probably the first reflection of the Black British presence in UK writing for children. It was not until 1986 that her first novel, the award-winning Frangipani House was published (Heinemann). It won a GLC Creative Writing Prize in 1982. Set in an old person's home in Guyana, it reflects one of her professional concerns: the position of ethnic minority elders and her persistent emphasis on the drive for human freedom. Boy Sandwich (Heinemann) was published in 1989, followed by Stedman and Joanna: A Love in Bondage (Vantage, 1991), and a collection of poems, Echoes and Voices (Vantage, 1991). Then came Sunlight and Sweet Water (Peepal Tree, 1994), Gather the Faces, In Praise of Love and Children and Inkle and Yarico (all Peepal Tree, 1994). Her last novel, The Green Grass Tango (Peepal Tree) was published in 2001, sadly after Beryl Gilroy's death in April of that year. Gilroy's early work examined the impact of life in Britain on West Indian families and her later work explored issues of African and Caribbean diaspora and slavery. In 1998, a collection of her non-fiction writing, entitled Leaves in the Wind, came out from Mango Publishing. It included her lectures, notes, essays, dissertations and personal reviews. |
![]() | ![]() | Roy, Namba. No Black Sparrows. Portsmouth/Oxford. 1989. Heinemann. 0435988123. Caribbean Writers Series. 217 pages. paperback. Cover illustration by Namba Roy. Cover design by Keith Pointing.
DESCRIPTION - Namba Roy has brought to life the colourful and historical crucible that was Jamaica in the 1930s. NO BLACK SPARROWS challenges social injustice, the use of capital punishment and orthodox Western religion at a time when. we black people starting to think. And we starting to see de holes in you religion, and you democracy and you civilization.' The novel focuses on. God's Little Sparrows' - orphans Sonna, Pazart, Mobel and Sista - who scrape a living selling bootlaces, pins and needles. The rough warmth they share with the generous Ironman who feeds them, and Captain Dimlight who teaches them. to speak English good', cannot however protect them from the sadistic community constable, Bangbelly: but an ironic twist ensures that the fate of both Bangbelly and Sonna are intertwined. This compelling tale boils over with vitality and an emotion that will appeal to readers everywhere. A remarkable book which contains much that is valuable, articulates, pertinent and positive.' - Anne Walmsley.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - NAMBA ROY was born in Jamaica in 1910. He spent his childhood in Kingston and in Accompong in the Cockpit Country - a refuge where escaped Jamaican slaves, known as Maroons, lived as free men. Roy's grandfather and father were both traditional village carvers - a role passed down from father to son - and it was from them that Roy learnt about African folklore and the art of Maroon story-telling and carving. Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, Roy joined the British Merchant Navy. Illness forced him to leave in 1944 and he remained in Britain where, in 1950, he met and later married English actress Yvonne Shelley, with whom he had three children. He died on l6 June 1961. Roy, a prodigious painter, carver and sculptor, wrote two books and several short stories, including NEGRO CREATION, an Afro-Maroon tale about the creation of the world, which was broadcast by the BBC in 1957. BLACK ALBINO, an historical adventure story about a Maroon community living in the mountains of Jamaica, was published by New Literature (Publishing) Ltd in 1961, shortly before the author's death. Black Albino was then published by Longman in 1986. NO BLACK SPARROWS was written over the years 1956 and 1957. The book was important to Roy as it described his own childhood experiences in Jamaica. |
![]() | ![]() | Brown, Stewart (editor). Caribbean New Wave: Contemporary Short Stories. Portsmouth. 1990. Heinemann. 043598814x. Caribbean Writers Series. 181 pages. paperback. Cover illustration by Cathy Morley.Cover design by Keith Pointing.
DESCRIPTION - A taste of the energy, commitment and talent of a whole new wave of Caribbean writing is offered in this anthology. Acting as a forum for both up-and-coming and internationally acclaimed writers, Caribbean New Wave is compiled of stories grounded in the lived experience of the contemporary Caribbean. The authors represented here have built on the achievements of names such as V.S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon and Wilson Harris who all rode the first wave to break on the literary shores of Britain and America in the 1950s and 60s, finding that the medium of the short story provided them with the ideal. way of saying' for their particular concerns and audience. Many of the writers in this collection were not even born when the first. wave' broke, most were unknown ten years ago and even those who have made international reputations. - James Berry, Jamaica Kincaid, Earl Lovelace, Olive Senior for example. - have essentially done so in the last decade. Delving into aspects of adolescence as well as adulthood domesticity as well as social and cultural change, the authors all express particular concerns with a passion which can only evolve from true life experience and, as a result, each tale is easily accessible to a wide audience throughout modern society. New Wave offers a good. way in' to Caribbean writing for people reading Caribbean literature for the first time, and, for serious students of Caribbean life and letters, it provides a unique insight into. life' in the Caribbean today.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - DR. STEWART BROWN studied Fine Art and Literature at Falmouth School of Art, Sussex University and the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Between times he worked and travelled in the Caribbean and West Africa, lecturing for three years at Bayero University, Kano, in northern Nigeria. He is presently lecturer in African and Caribbean literature at the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham. He has published two collections of his own poetry, ZINDER (1986) and LUGARD'S BRIDGE (1989) (both from Seren Books) and edited two poetry anthologies, CARIBBEAN POETRY NOW (Hodder & Stoughton, 1984) and, with Mervyn Morris and Gordon Rohlehr, VOICEPRINT (Longman, 1989). He has also published many essays and reviews of African and Caribbean writing in English in literary and academic journals, and in 1989 produced an introductory guide to African writing: WRITERS FROM AFRICA, published by Book Trust. |
![]() | ![]() | Mordecai, Pamela and Wilson, Betty (editors). Her True-True Name: An Anthology of Women's Writing From the Caribbean. Portsmouth. 1990. Heinemann. 0435989065. Caribbean Writers Series. 202 pages. paperback. Cover design by Keith Pointing based on an idea by Pam Mordecai. Cover batik, 'Metamorphosis' (1986) by Sharon Chacko.
DESCRIPTION - Like the scattered islands themselves, these fragments from thirty-one women writers display both the range and variety of Caribbean cultures and traditions, and their underlying tenacity and cohesion. From memories of turn-of-the-century Dominica to the contemporary USA, Africa and Britain, writers from Haiti to Cuba to Jamaica express the longing and the loss, the pride and the passion of the Caribbean identity. Their writings are a search for and ultimately a celebration of, that precious secret of survival and strength that even slavery could not stamp out. Differences of language - English, French and Spanish - point to a common history of migration and. imperialism. The precision of 'standard English' and the poetry of creole embody the rich contradictions of that heritage. Rooted in African folk-tradition, a modern self-defining consciousness insists on calling itself by its 'true-true name'.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Pamela (Pam) Mordecai was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and educated there at Convent of Mercy Alpha Academy. Alpha was one of the first places in the island to develop indigenous theatre and had a strong creative tradition, especially of performance in the arts. At Alpha she acted in many plays, developing an early love for theatre. As a child she played Cobweb in Midsummer Night's Dream, as a teenager, Hecuba in The Trojan Women. In 1960 she went to a small Catholic college for women in Newton, MA., one of a few women of colour. Returning to Jamaica, she taught at high school and then teacher training college. She also worked part-time in TV, hosting shows like "Saturday Magazine" and "Bambu-Tambu" for the Jamaica Information Service, where she met husband (and fellow writer), Martin Mordecai, whom she married in 1966. In 1974 she went to work at the University of the West Indies as Publications Officer in the Faculty of Education. During her time at UWI, she began a writing partnership with the late Grace Walker Gordon that lasted over twenty-five years. She also began a PhD (part-time) on the poetry of Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite that would take her 18 years to finish, every minute of which she enjoyed. Her first publication in 1987 was a book of children's poems, extension reading for Ginn & Company's highly successful Reading 360 Series. In addition to stories and poetry for children, she has written a play, "El Numero Uno," which had its world premiere in Toronto in 2010. Pam and her family emigrated to Canada in 1994. She and Martin live in Kitchener, Ontario. |
![]() | ![]() | Callender, Timothy. It So Happen. Portsmouth. 1991. Heinemann. 043598926x. Caribbean Writers Series. 127 pages. paperback. Cover design by Keith Pointing. Cover illustration by Pearl Alcock.
DESCRIPTION - Saga-boy and Jasper prepare for a grand stick-fight, Big Joe will do anything to marry the girl he loves, all the men are determined to defeat Marie in the rum drinking competition, and PaJohn the Obeah Man is foiled by his own wicked spell. Timothy Callender's close-knit community is full of zany characters. Their dialect, the troubles they face, and the celebrations they share, are realistic and overflowing with great humor.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - TIMOTHY CALLENDER (1946-1989) was born in Barbados where he became well known for his short stories during his student years at Combermere School. After graduating with special honours in English at thc University of the West Indies, he took a three year teaching post in St. Kitts during which time he continued research on. The Woman in the West Indian Novel'. In 1981, Callender was granted a Commonwealth Scholarship Award which enabled him to study for an MA in Art Design and Education at the University of London Institute of Education. He returned to Barbados in 1983, where he taught for many years at the University of the West Indies as well as at the St George Secondary School. In his later years, he taught Use of English, Creative Writing and Drama at the Barbados Community College. Callender cxpcrimented with many art forms and won awards for Short Stories, Playwriting and Art. He was an avid researcher of many diverse topics and themes, wrote numerous documentaries on art and art forms and held frequent art exhibitions. He also had a passion for music, studied the guitar and guitar music and was the author of many songs and poems. Like most West Indian authors, Callcnder's first stories were published in the Barbados Literary Journal (BIM). IT SO HAPPEN (1975) was his first book of stories, and was followed by the books THE ELEMENTS OF ART (1977) and HOW MUSIC CAME TO THE AINCHAN PEOPLE (1979). Just before his untimely death, Callender was developing epic story poems, one of which was serialised over the local radio station and ran for about six months. |
![]() | ![]() | Edgell, Zee. The Festival of San Joaquin. Portsmouth. 1991. Heinemann. 0435989278. Caribbean Writers Series. 307 pages. paperback. Cover design by Keith Pointing. Cover illustration by Rachel Ross.
DESCRIPTION - A PAPERBACK ORIGINAL. Times of joy, times of grief. the time it takes for the shine of youthful hope to be tarnished by the compromise of experience. Yet Pavana Leslie has not lost sight of the ideals of her student self, fashioned in sixties London far from her homeland of Belize. Resolved to make her contribution to the land of her birth, she returns home with her fatherless children, where the unwitting father IS now influential in the government. Private emotion twists with public crisis: Pavana strives to reconcile her personal and professional life, while the country itself is in turmoil as Independence approaches and rival factions battle for supremacy. Just as Belize will shake off colonial dependency, so, by the end of this enthralling saga, will Pavana achieve a new confidence, a new vision.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Zelma I. Edgell, better known as Zee Edgell, MBE, (born 21 October 1940 in Belize City, Belize) is a writer. She has had four of her novels published. She was an associate professor of English at Kent State University. After attending the local St. Catherine's Academy in Belize City (the basis for St. Cecilia's Academy in Beka Lamb), Edgell studied journalism at the school of modern languages at the Polytechnic of Central London and continued her education at the University of the West Indies. She worked as a journalist serving as the founding editor of The Reporter. She has also lived for extended periods in such diverse places as Jamaica, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Somalia, working with development organizations and the Peace Corps. She has been director of women's affairs for the government of Belize, lecturer at the former University College of Belize (forerunner to the University of Belize) and she was an associate professor in the department of English at Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, where she taught creative writing and literature. Edgell also tours internationally, giving book readings and delivering papers on the history and literature of Belize. She is considered Belize's principal contemporary writer. Edgell is married to American educator Al Edgell, who had a decades long career in international development. They have two children, Holly, a journalism professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, and Randall, a physician specializing in stroke treatment and prevention. Edgell has also contributed extensively to the Belizean Writers Series, published by local publishing house Cubola Productions. She edited and contributed stories to the fifth book in the series, Memories, Dreams and Nightmares: A Short Story Anthology of Belizean women writers, published in 2004. She was made a Member of the order of the British Empire in the 2007 Queen's Birthday Honour List. In 2009 the University of the West Indies conferred upon her the honorary degree D.Litt at graduation ceremonies in Cave Hill, Barbados. Her first novel, Beka Lamb, published in 1982, details the early years of the nationalist movement in British Honduras from the eyes of a teenage girl attending high school in the colony; given that it was published a year after Belize became independent this was the first novel to be published in the new nation. Beka Lamb also gained the distinction of being Belize's first novel to reach beyond its borders and gain an international audience, winning Britain's Fawcett Society Book Prize, a prize awarded annually to a work of fiction that contributes to an understanding of women's position in society today. Her subsequent novel, In Times Like These (1991) portrayed the turmoil of nearly independent Belize from the point of view of another female protagonist, this time the adult director of women's affairs (a post Edgell once held). The Festival of San Joaquin (1997), her third novel told the story of a woman accused of murdering her husband, and in her short stories, Edgell skillfully explores the layers of Belize's complicated social and racial stratification through the lens of her female protagonists. Edgell has said she would eventually like to write about male protagonists as well as her extensive travels across the world. Edgell's fourth novel was published by Heinemann's Caribbean Writers Series in January 2007. The events of Time and the River unfold during the heyday of slavery in Belize. It focuses on the life of a young slave woman, Leah Lawson, who eventually (through marriage) becomes a slaveowner herself. She even finds herself in the position of owning her own family members. The story is told against the backdrop of the brutal forestry slavery of the time and slave revolts, true historical moments in the history of the country that is now known as Belize. Edgell released this book in Belize at the end of March with appearances at the University of Belize, Belmopan and in Belize City. Edgell's third novel,. The Festival of San Joaquin,' will be re-issued by Macmillan Caribbean in October 2008. |
![]() | ![]() | McKenzie, Earl. A Boy Named Ossie: A Jamaican Childhood. Portsmouth. 1991. Heinemann. 0435988166. Caribbean Writers Series. A Paperback Original. 104 pages. paperback. Cover design by Keith Pointing. Cover illustration by Linda Scott.
DESCRIPTION - The man who transports bees from hive to hive on his body, an acrobat who takes up a multitude of shapes and guises, a female stonebreaker who is completely deaf. Ossie meets them all in this imaginative collection of short stories. Behind beguilingly simple tales and extraordinary individuals McKenzie explores real political and social issues, proverbs, rituals and folklore. He writes with freshness and charm, of life in rural Jamaica: its humour, warmth and ambitions, as well as its terrors and tribulations. A BOY NAMED OSSIE is Earl McKenzie's first book.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Earl McKenzie was born in rural Mount Charles, St. Andrew Jamaica in 1943. He attended Oberlin High School and Mico Teachers College. Then he lived for some years in the USA and Canada where he obtained a BA and MFA from Columbia University and a Ph D from the University of British Columbia. In Jamaica he taught in several high schools and at Church Teachers College. He currently lectures in Philosophy at the University of the West Indies, Mona. In addition to his poetry in Against Linearity (Peepal Tree, 1993), he is the author of the novel, A Boy Named Ossie: A Jamaican Childhood (Heinemann, 1991) and Two Roads to Mount Joyful & Other Stories (Longman, 1992). His work has appeared in the following anthologies: Caribbean New Wave; The Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories and Perspectives. He is a quiet, seemingly shy man. He paints with distinction. A Jamaican reader of Against Linearity told Peepal Tree that he had captured the essence of Jamaica in his poems. |
![]() | ![]() | Maharaj, Clem. The Dispossessed. Portsmouth. 1992. Heinemann. 0435989286. Caribbean Writers Series. A Paperback Original. 137 pages. paperback. Cover design by Keith Pointing. Cover illustration by Cathy Morley. Author photograph by Val Wilmer.
DESCRIPTION - We is cane people and notting else and when de cane is done we finish.' Yet with the bankruptcy of the sugar plantation, the labourers have to face the loss of their livelihood. In this elegiac novel, Clem Maharaj goes to the heart of a dying community, where fear and despair co-exist with robust laughter and sustaining friendship. With poignant clarity he unfolds the lives that have been bound together by the estate and extends a sensitive understanding to all those bound up in its history: the betrayed and the betrayers, the rum-soaked and the sex-obsessed, the fighters and the losers. It is a tribute to the humanity of all the dispossessed.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - CLEM MAHARAJ was born in Chaguanas, Trinidad. He grew up on a sugar estate near Princes Town and attended a Catholic secondary school in Port of Spain. In 1960 he came to England and in 1967 he began working for C.L.R. James, the philosopher, and developed an interest in writing. He has organised several groups and campaigns around social and political issues. In recent years he has concentrated more on writing, and continues to work at an inner London law centre. THE DISPOSSESSED is his first novel. |
![]() | ![]() | McDonald, Ian and Brown, Stewart (editors). The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry. London. 1992. Heinemann. 0435988174. Caribbean Writers Series. 256 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - West Indians, as Ian McDonald comments, 'write poetry as well as they play cricket' and Heinemann's anthology is the most comprehensive and up-to-date selection of contemporary Caribbean poetry, including major names like Derek Walcott, John Agard, and Merle Collins, alongside new poets of the region. This collection is an invaluable academic selection and will provide a fine introduction for the general reader interested in the lyricism of Caribbean poetry.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ian McDonald (born 18 April 1933) is a Caribbean-born writer who describes himself as "Antiguan by ancestry, Trinidadian by birth, Guyanese by adoption, and West Indian by conviction." His ancestry on his father's side is Antiguan and Kittitian, and Trinidadian on his mother's side. His only novel The Humming-Bird Tree, first published in 1969, is considered a classic of Caribbean literature. Stewart Brown is a poet and critic who teaches African and Caribbean literature at the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham. |
![]() | ![]() | Collymore, Frank. The Man Who Loved Attending Funerals and Other Stories. Portsmouth. 1993. Heinemann. 0435989316. Caribbean Writers Series. 179 pages. paperback. Cover illustration by Jamel Akib.
DESCRIPTION - Frank Collymore was at the centre of the West Indian literary renaissance of the forties and fifties. He was a master of the short story, bringing together a mordant wit and a sympathetic understanding of human failings to tackle subjects ranging from the eccentric to the psychotic. This collection includes. Shadows', a sombre depiction of alienation, a satirical dissection of social climbing in. RSVP to Mrs Bush-Hall', and in. The Snag' a young boy's growing pains are written about with gentle irony.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frank Appleton Collymore MBE (7 January 1893 - 17 July 1980) was a famous Barbadian literary editor, author, poet, stage performer and painter. His nickname was. Barbadian Man of the Arts'. He also taught for 50 years at Combermere School, where he sought out and encouraged prospective writers in his classes, notably George Lamming. Collymore was born at Woodville Cottage, Chelsea Road, Saint Michael, Barbados (where he lived all his life). Aside from being a student at Combermere School (from 1903 until 1910), he was also one of its staff members until his retirement in 1958, up to which point he was its Deputy Headmaster. After this, he often returned to teach until 1963. On the stage, he became a member of the. Bridgetown Players', which began in 1942. As an artist, he made many drawings and paintings to illustrate his own writings. He called them. Collybeasts' or. Collycreatures'. In 1942, he began the famous Caribbean literary magazine BIM (originally published four times a year), for which he is most well-known, and was also its editor until 1975. John T. Gilmore has written of Collymore:. As a lover of literature, he was also a dedicated and selfless encourager of the work of others, lending books to aspiring writers from their schooldays onwards, publishing their early work in Bim, the literary magazine he edited for more than fifty issues from the 1940s to the 1970s, and helping them to find other markets, especially through the relationship he established with Henry Swanzy, producer of the influential BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices.' Three literary awards have been named after him. |
![]() | ![]() | Craig, Christine. Mint Tea and Other Stories. Portsmouth. 1993. Heinemann. 0435989324. Caribbean Writers Series. 144 pages. paperback. Cover design by Touchpaper. Cover illustration by Chloe Cheese.
DESCRIPTION - These stories of love, injustice and the innermost feelings of women are tender and poignant as they weave between generations, past and present. They give a powerful and vivid view of Jamaican life shot through with pride and struggle, contempt and pain. In MINT TEA, her first collection of short stories, Craig displays a flair for language and imagery and a subtle sense of irony. Christine Craig is a Jamaican author, now living in the United States.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Christine Craig (born 24 June 1943) is a Jamaican writer living in Florida, US. She has published collections of poetry and short stories, as well as children's fiction and several non-fiction works. Christine Craig was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and grew up in rural Saint Elizabeth. She received a BA from the University of the West Indies. In 1970, she published her first work, Emanuel and His Parrot, a children's book. She began publishing poetry in the late 1970s and published her first poetry collection, Quadrille for Tigers, in 1984. In 1993, Craig published a collection of short stories entitled Mint Tea. She also researched, wrote and presented a series of stories on Jamaican history for children's television. Craig tutored English literature at the University of the West Indies and was adjunct professor at Barry University in Florida. In 1989, she took part in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She was editor in Miami for the The Jamaica Gleaner from 1990 to 1998. She later moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. |
![]() | ![]() | Powell, Patricia. Me Dying Trial. Portsmouth. 1993. Heinemann. 0435989359. Caribbean Writers Series. 192 pages. paperback. Cover illustration by Jane Human.
DESCRIPTION - Gwennie lives in a sleepy rural Jamaican backwater. Weighed down by a wayward brood of children and trapped in her unhappy marriage to Walter, she seeks solace in the company of her friends. Soon she is faced with a hard choice: does she flee from her past and the everyday cruelties of family life, or is she to remain a victim of her sense of duty? ME DYING TRIAL is a poignant tale of a woman's response to sudden change. It combines lightness and joie de vivre with an infinite sadness. Jamaican-born Patricia Powell teaches creative writing in the United States.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Patricia Powell (born 1966) is a Jamaican writer. Born in Jamaica, she moved to the United States in her late teens. She received her bachelor's degree at Wellesley College, and an MFA in creative writing from Brown University, where she studied with Michael Ondaatje, among others. She began her teaching career in 1991 in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston. In 2001, Powell was the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard University. In 2003, she was announced as the Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at MIT. Most of her work is not autobiographical, but explores personal themes of rejection, displacement, and healing through the lives of highly varied characters, ranging from a gay Jamaican man dying of AIDS, to a cross-dressing Chinese woman immigrant to Jamaica, to Nanny, a heroine of Jamaican independence. |
![]() | ![]() | Scott, Lawrence. Witchbroom. Portsmouth. 1993. Heinemann. 0435989332. Caribbean Writers Series. 272 pages. paperback. Cover illustration by Slatter-Anderson, Cover design by by Getset (BTS) Ltd.
DESCRIPTION - A curious narrator called Lavren, both male and female, tells carnival tales of crime and passion. These tales evoke a visionary history of the Monagas family and their island. WITCHBROOM is a brilliant first novel which reveals the history of a Caribbean island with an intensity and originality that is unrivalled. This novel has more of the tone and texture and taste of the Caribbean milieu than any novel I can think of. This is a wonderful novel: rich, sensuous, quirky, energetic, vividly memorable.' - Stewart Brown, Lecturer in African and Caribbean Literature, University of Birmingham.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Lawrence Scott (born in Trinidad, 1943) is an award-winning novelist and short-story writer from Trinidad & Tobago, currently living in London and Trinidad. His novels have been awarded (1998) and short-listed (1992, 2004) for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and twice nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (for Aelred's Sin in 2000 and Night Calypso in 2006). His stories have been much anthologized and he won the Tom-Gallon Short-Story Award in 1986. He divides his time between London and Port of Spain. Born on a sugarcane estate in Trinidad, Scott is a descendant of Trinidad's French and German creoles. He was educated at Boys' RC School, San Fernando, Trinidad (1950-54), and by the Benedictine monks at the Abbey School, Mount Saint Benedict, Tunapuna (1955-62), before leaving for England. There he attended Prinknash Abbey, Gloucester, studying Philosophy and Theology (1963-67), St Clare's Hall Oxford, gaining a BA Hons. degree in English Language & Literature (1968-72), and Manchester University, earning a Certificate In Education, English & Drama (Distinction) in 1972-73. Between 1973 and 2006 Scott worked as a teacher (of English and Drama) at various schools in London and in Trinidad, including Sedgehill, London; Thomas Calton Comprehensive, London; Presentation College, San Fernando, Trinidad; Aranguez Junior Secondary, Trinidad; Tulse Hill Comprehensive and Archbishop Tenison's, London. Between 1983 and 2006 he taught Literature and Creative Writing at City & Islington Sixth Form College, London. He was a Writer-in-Residence at the University of the West Indies (UWI) in 2004. In 2006-09 he was a Senior Research Fellow of The Academy for Arts, Letters, Culture and Public Affairs at the University of Trinidad and Tobago (UTT). His academic research has included the Golconda Research/Writing Project, an oral history project in Trinidad. He has also researched extensively the life and times of Trinidad's nineteenth-century artist Michel-Jean Cazabon, which work informs his 2012 novel Light Falling on Bamboo. Since 1992 Scott's publications include four novels, a collection of short stories and a book of non-fiction. His stories have been broadcast on BBC radio and have been anthologised internationally, notably in The Penguin Book of Caribbean Short Stories, The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories and Our Caribbean, A Gathering of Lesbian & Gay Writing from the Antilles (Duke University Press). He has also published poetry in several anthologies and journals, including Caribbean New Voices 1 (Longman, 1995), Trinidad & Tobago Review, Cross/Cultures 60 (Editions Rodopi B.V. Amsterdam - New York, 2002), Agenda and Wasafiri. In addition he is the author of numerous essays, reviews and interviews on the work of other Caribbean writers, including Earl Lovelace and Derek Walcott. |
![]() | ![]() | Spence, Vanessa. The Roads Are Down. Portsmouth. 1993. Heinemann. 0435989308. Caribbean Writers Series. 1st Novel. 104 pages. paperback. Cover illustration by Rosemary Woods. Cover design by Touchpaper.
DESCRIPTION - Katherine lives in the Blue Mountains above Kingston, relishing her independence and the beauty of the place. Then she meets Bob, a middle-aged, married American, and an unlikely friendship leads to love. The situation seems to be under control until Bob's wife tries to reclaim him and Katherine is forced to acknowledge her own vulnerability. With subtlety and laconic humour, Vanessa Spence explores the hazardous battle zones between gender, culture and race.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - VANESSA SPENCE was born in 1961 in Kingston, Jamaica. She was named after Vanessa Bell of Bloomsbury Group fame, who was her great aunt. She grew up in Jamaica and was later educated at the Universities of Oxford and Yale. She has lived in Sierra Leone, India and Pakistan and travelled widely in East and Southern Africa. As an economist, she has worked in the fields of public utility regulation and development banking. She now works for the state privatisation agency in Kingston and lives in the Blue Mountains. THE ROADS ARE DOWN is her first novel. |
![]() | ![]() | Powell, Patricia. A Small Gathering of Bones. Portsmouth. 1994. Heinemann. 0435989367. Caribbean Writers Series. 137 pages. paperback. Cover illustration by Jane Human.
DESCRIPTION - Dale's passionate relationship with Nevin is foundering. Hope and despair, jealousy and yearning battle within him. He must confront the antagonism of family, church and society to his homosexuality. A mysterious illness is threatening the gay community of late 1970s Jamaica. When Dale's friends succumb to it, his own isolation increases and he is pushed towards desperate action. A SMALL GATHERING OF BONES explores the complexity of homosexual experience with frankness and sensitivity. REVIEW of ME DYING TRIAL:. ME DYING TRIAL, an impressive, multigenerational first novel, is by an expatriate, still in her twenties, who clearly has a brilliant career ahead of her.' - ISLANDS. Jamaican-born Patricia Powell teaches creative writing in the United States. Her first novel, ME DYING TRIAL, was published in 1993.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Patricia Powell (born 1966) is a Jamaican writer. Born in Jamaica, she moved to the United States in her late teens. She received her bachelor's degree at Wellesley College, and an MFA in creative writing from Brown University, where she studied with Michael Ondaatje, among others. She began her teaching career in 1991 in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston. In 2001, Powell was the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard University. In 2003, she was announced as the Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at MIT. Most of her work is not autobiographical, but explores personal themes of rejection, displacement, and healing through the lives of highly varied characters, ranging from a gay Jamaican man dying of AIDS, to a cross-dressing Chinese woman immigrant to Jamaica, to Nanny, a heroine of Jamaican independence. |
![]() | ![]() | Scott, Lawrence. Ballad For the New World and Other Stories. Portsmouth. 1994. Heinemann. 0435989391. Caribbean Writers Series. 114 pages. paperback. Cover illustration by John Brennan.
DESCRIPTION - You see, you start telling the story about a guy and then you get to telling the story of a time, a place, a people and a world.' Tales of thwarted desires, repressed passions and betrayals evoke a troubled Caribbean paradise. The legacy of a cruel history haunts this new world society. Individuals are consumed by their own emotions and confused by the shifting ground of their own cultures. With a blend of pathos and ironic humour, Lawrence Scott describes life in this fallen Eden, where both the melancholy and the extravagant play their part.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Lawrence Scott (born in Trinidad, 1943) is an award-winning novelist and short-story writer from Trinidad & Tobago, currently living in London and Trinidad. His novels have been awarded (1998) and short-listed (1992, 2004) for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and twice nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (for Aelred's Sin in 2000 and Night Calypso in 2006). His stories have been much anthologized and he won the Tom-Gallon Short-Story Award in 1986. He divides his time between London and Port of Spain. Born on a sugarcane estate in Trinidad, Scott is a descendant of Trinidad's French and German creoles. He was educated at Boys' RC School, San Fernando, Trinidad (1950-54), and by the Benedictine monks at the Abbey School, Mount Saint Benedict, Tunapuna (1955-62), before leaving for England. There he attended Prinknash Abbey, Gloucester, studying Philosophy and Theology (1963-67), St Clare's Hall Oxford, gaining a BA Hons. degree in English Language & Literature (1968-72), and Manchester University, earning a Certificate In Education, English & Drama (Distinction) in 1972-73. Between 1973 and 2006 Scott worked as a teacher (of English and Drama) at various schools in London and in Trinidad, including Sedgehill, London; Thomas Calton Comprehensive, London; Presentation College, San Fernando, Trinidad; Aranguez Junior Secondary, Trinidad; Tulse Hill Comprehensive and Archbishop Tenison's, London. Between 1983 and 2006 he taught Literature and Creative Writing at City & Islington Sixth Form College, London. He was a Writer-in-Residence at the University of the West Indies (UWI) in 2004. In 2006-09 he was a Senior Research Fellow of The Academy for Arts, Letters, Culture and Public Affairs at the University of Trinidad and Tobago (UTT). His academic research has included the Golconda Research/Writing Project, an oral history project in Trinidad. He has also researched extensively the life and times of Trinidad's nineteenth-century artist Michel-Jean Cazabon, which work informs his 2012 novel Light Falling on Bamboo. Since 1992 Scott's publications include four novels, a collection of short stories and a book of non-fiction. His stories have been broadcast on BBC radio and have been anthologised internationally, notably in The Penguin Book of Caribbean Short Stories, The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories and Our Caribbean, A Gathering of Lesbian & Gay Writing from the Antilles (Duke University Press). He has also published poetry in several anthologies and journals, including Caribbean New Voices 1 (Longman, 1995), Trinidad & Tobago Review, Cross/Cultures 60 (Editions Rodopi B.V. Amsterdam - New York, 2002), Agenda and Wasafiri. In addition he is the author of numerous essays, reviews and interviews on the work of other Caribbean writers, including Earl Lovelace and Derek Walcott. |
![]() | ![]() | Thomas, H. Nigel. Spirits in the Dark. Portsmouth. 1994. Heinemann. 0435989413. Caribbean Writers Series. 219 pages. paperback. Cover design by Touchpaper. Cover illustration by T. Anthony Joyette.
DESCRIPTION - Jerome Quashee undergoes a religious ritual, blocking all sensual links to the outside world, in order to see clearly into his past and find the sources of the pain and guilt that torment his soul. H. Nigel Thomas writes with compelling honesty about the confusing maze of pressures that paralyse Jerome. His intelligence at first promises him a gateway out of the poverty his parents have known, but he must compete with privileged White boys for scholarships in a racist, class-ridden culture. He wrestles both with the guilt of knowing so little about his African heritage and the simultaneous pressure to think, speak and act as a White person. And he will bring disgrace on his family if he does not repress his emerging homosexuality.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - H[ubert] Nigel Thomas was born in St Vincent and the Grenadines in 1947 but emigrated to Canada in 1968. His poems and short stories have been published in numerous journals and anthologies. He is also the author of FROM FOLKLORE TO FICTION: A STUDY OF FOLK HEROES AND RITUALS IN THE BLACK AMERICAN NOVEL (Greenwood, 1988), the forthcoming HOW LOUD CAN THE VILLAGE COCK CROW? (a collection of short stories), and several essays on African American, Caribbean and African literature. He is presently an associate professor in the literature department at UniversitE Laval in Quebec City, Canada. SPIRITS IN THE DARK is his first novel. |
![]() | ![]() | Anthony, Michael. In the Heat of the Day. New York. 1996. Heinemann. 0435989448. Caribbean Writers Series. 250 pages. paperback. Cover illustration by Jane Human.
DESCRIPTION - But you know something? We'll win, you know. We bound to win in the end. But I don't know when the end is.' It is 1903 in Trinidad. Eva's rage at her people's treatment under colonial rule is growing. With just a few days to go before the government passes oppressive new legislation, the people start to voice their opposition. Eva embarks on a desperate plan. Michael Anthony's story of love, revenge and racial tension brings to life a tragic episode in Trinidad's history. Michael Anthony is from Trinidad. He is the author of many novels, as well as books about the history of the Caribbean.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Anthony (born 10 February 1932) is an eminent Caribbean author and historian, who has been named one of the. 50 most influential people in Trinidad and Tobago. Born in Mayaro, Trinidad, on 10 February 1932 to Nathaniel Anthony and Eva Jones Lazarus. Anthony was educated at Mayaro Roman Catholic School and Junior Technical College, San Fernando, Trinidad. He subsequently took a job as a foundry worker in Pointe- -Pierre for five years but had ambitions to become a journalist, and poems of his were published by the Trinidad Guardian in 1953. Yet it was not enough for him to secure a new job locally and Anthony decided to further his career in the United Kingdom. His voyage there on board the Hildebrandt took place in December 1954. In England he held several jobs including as a sub-editor at Reuters news agency (1964-8), while developing his career as a writer, writing short stories for the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices. In 1958 he married Yvette Phillip (a poet) and they had four children. - Jennifer, Keith, Carlos and Sandra. Four years later, Anthony published his first book, The Games Were Coming, a cycling story inspired by real events. He followed up its success with The Year in San Fernando and Green Days by the River. He eventually returned to Trinidad in 1970 (after spending two years as part of the Trinidadian diplomatic corps in Brazil, where his novel King of the Masquerade is set) and worked variously as an editor, a researcher for the Ministry of Culture, and as a radio broadcaster of historical programmes. In 1992, he spent time at the University of Richmond in Virginia teaching creative writing. In his five-decade career, Anthony has had over 30 titles published, including novels, collections of short fiction, books for younger readers, travelogues and histories. He has also been a contributor to many anthologies and journals, including Caribbean Prose, Island Voices - Stories from the Caribbean, Response, The Sun's Eyes, West Indian Narrative, The Bajan, and BIM magazine. In 1979 he was awarded the Hummingbird Medal (Gold) for his contributions to Literature, and he received an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies (UWI) in 2003. |
![]() | ![]() | Baldeosingh, Kevin. The Autobiography of Paras P. Portsmouth. 1996. Heinemann. 0435988182. Caribbean Writers Series. 180 pages. paperback. Cover illustration by Spike Gerrell.
DESCRIPTION - I was never one to follow the crowd - unless they were looking at a fatal accident.' Set in the Caribbean island of Trinidad, Kevin Baldeosingh's hilarious satire presents the inimitable Paras P. Discover the undiluted truth about the self-declared anti-revolutionary of the order of Jesus Christ and Mahatma Gandhi, the Founder of the Centre for Correctness. With a little help from a tape recorder, Paras P. reveals all we need to know about politics, religion, the media, marriage and sexual norms. This witty commentary on the hypocrisies of modern life demonstrates the truth that. Against the assault of laughter, nothing will stand' (Mark Twain). Born in Trinidad, Kevin Baldeosingh is a journalist working on the Trinidad Guardian. This is his first novel.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kevin Baldeosingh (born 1963) is a Trinidadian newspaper columnist, author and Humanist, who has been involved in many controversial social issues. He now works with the Trinidad and Tobago Express as a writer on a freelance basis. In twenty years as a professional writer he has written over 2,000 newspaper articles, over 30 periodical articles and papers, 20-plus short stories, and three novels. In 2007, his one-act play, The Comedian, was one of the four winning plays in the National Drama Association playwriting contest. He was also one of 15 prize-winning finalists in a 2007 international essay competition, organized by US-based. TRACE International' (a non-profit organization that develops and promotes anti-bribery programs), on official corruption and how to prevent it. He is a co-founder and chairman of the Trinidad and Tobago Humanist Association, the only organization of its kind in the Anglophone Caribbean. He is also vice-chair for ASPIRE (Advocates for Safe Parenthood: Improving Reproductive Equity), a lobby group seeking clarification and updating of Trinidad and Tobago's laws on abortion, with the aim of reducing the health risks and maternal mortality associated with unsafe illegal abortions. He was regional Chairperson for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Canada/Caribbean) for 2000 and 2001. |
![]() | ![]() | Edgell, Zee. The Festival of San Joaquin. Portsmouth. 1997. Heinemann. 0435989480. Caribbean Writers Series. 155 pages. paperback. Cover illustration by Derek Lockhart. Cover design by Touchpaper.
DESCRIPTION - Luz Marina, cleared of murdering her brutal husband, is released from prison on a three-year probation. Determined to rebuild her life and gain custody of her children, she perseveres, sustained by mother love and her faith in God in her battle against the poverty, guilt, vanity, and vengeance that threaten to overwhelm her. In this novel, set in the Mestizo community in Belize, Zee Edgell explores with sensitivity and understanding the contradictory and secret territory that is domestic violence.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Zelma I. Edgell, better known as Zee Edgell, MBE, (born 21 October 1940 in Belize City, Belize) is a writer. She has had four of her novels published. She was an associate professor of English at Kent State University. After attending the local St. Catherine's Academy in Belize City (the basis for St. Cecilia's Academy in Beka Lamb), Edgell studied journalism at the school of modern languages at the Polytechnic of Central London and continued her education at the University of the West Indies. She worked as a journalist serving as the founding editor of The Reporter. She has also lived for extended periods in such diverse places as Jamaica, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Somalia, working with development organizations and the Peace Corps. She has been director of women's affairs for the government of Belize, lecturer at the former University College of Belize (forerunner to the University of Belize) and she was an associate professor in the department of English at Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, where she taught creative writing and literature. Edgell also tours internationally, giving book readings and delivering papers on the history and literature of Belize. She is considered Belize's principal contemporary writer. Edgell is married to American educator Al Edgell, who had a decades long career in international development. They have two children, Holly, a journalism professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, and Randall, a physician specializing in stroke treatment and prevention. Edgell has also contributed extensively to the Belizean Writers Series, published by local publishing house Cubola Productions. She edited and contributed stories to the fifth book in the series, Memories, Dreams and Nightmares: A Short Story Anthology of Belizean women writers, published in 2004. She was made a Member of the order of the British Empire in the 2007 Queen's Birthday Honour List. In 2009 the University of the West Indies conferred upon her the honorary degree D.Litt at graduation ceremonies in Cave Hill, Barbados. Her first novel, Beka Lamb, published in 1982, details the early years of the nationalist movement in British Honduras from the eyes of a teenage girl attending high school in the colony; given that it was published a year after Belize became independent this was the first novel to be published in the new nation. Beka Lamb also gained the distinction of being Belize's first novel to reach beyond its borders and gain an international audience, winning Britain's Fawcett Society Book Prize, a prize awarded annually to a work of fiction that contributes to an understanding of women's position in society today. Her subsequent novel, In Times Like These (1991) portrayed the turmoil of nearly independent Belize from the point of view of another female protagonist, this time the adult director of women's affairs (a post Edgell once held). The Festival of San Joaquin (1997), her third novel told the story of a woman accused of murdering her husband, and in her short stories, Edgell skillfully explores the layers of Belize's complicated social and racial stratification through the lens of her female protagonists. Edgell has said she would eventually like to write about male protagonists as well as her extensive travels across the world. Edgell's fourth novel was published by Heinemann's Caribbean Writers Series in January 2007. The events of Time and the River unfold during the heyday of slavery in Belize. It focuses on the life of a young slave woman, Leah Lawson, who eventually (through marriage) becomes a slaveowner herself. She even finds herself in the position of owning her own family members. The story is told against the backdrop of the brutal forestry slavery of the time and slave revolts, true historical moments in the history of the country that is now known as Belize. Edgell released this book in Belize at the end of March with appearances at the University of Belize, Belmopan and in Belize City. Edgell's third novel,. The Festival of San Joaquin,' will be re-issued by Macmillan Caribbean in October 2008. |
![]() | ![]() | Naipaul, V. S. Miguel Street. Portsmouth. 2000. Heinemann. 0435989545. Caribbean Writers Series. Introduction by Laban Erapu, formerly Department of Literature, Makerere University. 176 pages. paperback. Cover illustration by Gavin Bloor. Reprint with new inntroduction.
DESCRIPTION - The vibrant community of Miguel Street is brought to life through the eyes of a child. Characters, such as Bogart, Big Foot and Man-man refuse to be confined by the limitations of their everyday existence and create a more romantic version of reality. The growing boy delights in their humour and eccentricity, but he gradually becomes aware that no one can run from reality forever. MIGUEL STREET is both a nostalgic view of childhood recalled in exile and a study of the limitations 'of life in 1940s Trinidad.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work. for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.' The Committee added,. Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.' The Committee also noted Naipaul's affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he. allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution', promoting. colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies'.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul's following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably. analysed' India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with. grudging affection' (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with. ungrudging affection' (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul's support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a. creative passion', and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a. mortal wound.' He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul's sometime protEgE Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia's Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of. Indian' and. African' and to concentrate on being. Trinidadian'. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul's first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir. |
![]() | ![]() | Anthony, Michael. High Tide of Intrigue. London. 2001. Heinemann. 0435989561. Caribbean Writers Series. 256. pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Police Officer Maureen Mason-Adams is unswerving in her commitment to the fight against drugs. When she discovers that fellow officers are in league with traffickers running between Trinidad and Grenada, the clean-up campaign becomes a personal crusade. At risk of her life, Maureen embarks on an island hopping investigation of a multimillion-dollar trade conducted by some of the Caribbean's most dangerous men.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Anthony writes novels that portray West Indian life in his native Trinidad, creating memorable characters who struggle with the conflicts caused by societal restrictions. He has earned a reputation for writing simple, yet sensitive novels depicting the experiences and events of his youth. |
![]() | ![]() | Forbes, Curdella. Songs of Silence. London. 2003. Heinemann. 043598957x. Caribbean Writers Series. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Songs of Silence is a colourful patchwork of observations of life in 1960s rural Jamaica, as seen through the eyes of a young girl. Held together by the sure and simple voice of a child, this powerful narrative is interspersed with the whisper of adult reflection, rendering the accounts at once sensuous and disarmingly honest.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Curdella Forbes was born in Jamaica. As well as Songs of Silence, she has written a collection of stories for young teenagers entitled Flying with Icarus and Other Stories (Walker Books) and has contributed to an anthology, Survivor (Walker Books, 2002). 160pp World |
![]() | ![]() | Ramsay, Paulette. Aunt Jen. London. 2003. Heinemann. 0435910124. Caribbean Writers Series. 112. pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Sunshine, a young Jamaican girl, is desperate to know and understand her identity. Written as a series of letters to her absent mother, Aunt Jen traces the changing attitudes of a child entering adulthood as she begins to realise and accept the truth behind her mother's departure. Aunt Jen is a deft, heart- wrenching, instructively imaginative and ultimately timeless representation of an intimate corner of Jamaican social history.' Edward Baugh.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paulette Ramsay grew up in Jamaica. She is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Languages at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. Her published articles, translations, reviews and interviews have appeared in several academic journals. |
![]() | ![]() | Imoja, Nailah Folami. Pick of the Crop. London. 2004. Heinemann. 0435989669. Caribbean Writers Series. 112 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Leroi Baines is a young man with a real gift for music and particularly calypso. When he is invited to audition for the Uprising calypso tent and makes it to the finals for the Pick of the Crop competition, everything seems to be going his way. However, in his quest to be Calypso King he has to learn to handle popularity and success, and see off the threats posed by those who are all too keen to sabotage his achievements.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nailah Folami Imoja is a creative writer and educator in Christ Church, Barbados. She currently teaches at Cane Vale Preparatory School of which she is the Principal. |
![]() | ![]() | McKenzie, Alecia. Doctor s Orders. London. 2005. Heinemann. 0435988271. Caribbean Writers Series. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Doctor Ezekial' Baker and his accomplice Shorty, tire of the. three-card scam' after being chased once too often by an angry crowd. Turning their attention to real estate, they sell mythical plots of land for a non-existent resort. Things are looking good until the two teenage grandchildren of one of their. investors' begin to track Doctor and Shorty across Jamaica.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alecia McKenzie (born Kingston, Jamaica) is a Jamaican writer and journalist. She studied at Alpha Academy in Kingston, Troy University in Alabama, and Columbia University in New York, focusing on languages, art and journalism. At Troy University, she was the first Jamaican editor of the student newspaper, The Tropolitan, and graduated summa cum laude. She has worked for various international news organizations and has taught Communications at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Besides Jamaica, she has lived in the United States, Belgium, England and Singapore and now mainly shares her time between France, where she is based with her family, and the Caribbean. Her first collection of short stories, Satellite City, won the regional Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book (Canada and the Caribbean). Her second book, When the Rain Stopped in Natland, is a novella for young readers, and has been included on the literacy program in several schools.That was followed by a novella for teenagers, Doctor s Orders, which is a part-adventure, part-detective story, with mostly teenage characters, set in the Caribbean; and a second collection of stories, Stories From Yard, first published in its Italian translation. Her fifth book, Sweetheart, a novel, was on 21 May 2012 announced as the Caribbean regional winner of the Commonwealth Book Prize 2012. The French translation of Sweetheart (Tr sor) won the Prix Carbet des lyc ens in 2017 - translated by S. Schler. In 2020, her novel A Million Aunties was published in the Caribbean and North America, and it went on to be longlisted for the 2022 International Dublin Literary Award. Hardback and paperback editions were published in the United Kingdom in 2022 and 2023 respectively. McKenzie's stories have appeared in the following anthologies, among others: The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories, Global Tales, Light Transports, Girls' Night In, Stories from Blue Latitudes, The Penguin Book of Caribbean Short Stories, Bridges: A Global Anthology of Short Stories, Crises, Risks and New Regionalisms in Europe, Extranezas cosmopolitas (Spanish), and R manska Amer ka (Icelandic). Literary magazines and sites that have carried her short fiction include The Malahat Review and Culture (French). Her poetry has also been published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the Journal of Caribbean Literatures, Leggere Donna, The Gleaner and other publications. As a reporter, she has written numerous articles that have appeared in a range of media, including The Guardian, Black Enterprise, The Wall Street Journal Europe, New African, and Chess Life. |
![]() | ![]() | Roberts-Squires, Maria. October All Over. London. 2005. Heinemann. 0435988263. Caribbean Writers Series. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Set in the aftermath of the Grenadian revolution, October All Over tracks the parallel lives of two generations of Grenadians. As the revolutionary government splits, the characters play out their own personal dramas against the backdrop of the political division and shifting factions.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Maria Roberts Squires was born in Petite Martinique, the smaller of the Grenada and the Grenadines islands. October all Over is her first novel. 128pp World |
![]() | ![]() | Edgell, Zee. Time and the River. London. 2007. Heinemann. 0435215183. Caribbean Writers Series. 208 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Time and the River is about freedom and slavery, hope and betrayal. It tells the story of people who don't own their own land or time, or even their own bodies. Leah Lawson is the daughter of a slave owner and a slave woman in Belize. In dreaming of a better future Leah must make some difficult choices. Her life takes drastic turns, changing her from slave into mistress, and forcing her to take the lives of her family and best friend into her own hands.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - After travelling widely, Zee Edgell returned to Belize to teach, and in 1981-2 was appointed Director of the Women's Bureau of the Department of Women's Affairs. She now lives with her family in Belize. |
![]() | ![]() | Harold, Gwyneth. Bad Girls in School. London. 2007. Heinemann. 9780435215170. Caribbean Writers Series. 160 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - The atrocious behaviour of Taj, Cally and Katty, students at Redeemer College for Girls, has disrupted the school. Principal Slipe- Torrington, determined to bring back order, has isolated them for expulsion. However, the soft-hearted chairman of the school board, Canon Rodney Pryce, with the help of the na ve young librarian, Elaine Mico, thwarts her plans. A special one-year programme is set up for the rehabilitation of the girls. Will the bad girls reform, or simply continue to tear down all that is good around them?
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gwyneth Harold is a journalist, communications profession and writer from Kingston, Jamaica. |
![]() | ![]() | Henry, Lewis. The Gaulin and the Dove. London. 2008. Heinemann. 0435899384. Caribbean Writers Series. 128 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Set in pre-independence Barbados, The Gaulin and the Dove tells the story of the Mau-Mau Raiders, a group of seven boys coming of age in a village dominated by agriculture and an entrenched plantocracy. The novel follows the boys' adventures and mischief around their beloved island. Cricket matches, kite flying and hunting expeditions come alive on the page against a backdrop of a close-knit community. Seen through the eyes of adolescents, questions around family structures, leadership, the role of the peer group and the natural environment are seen to be as relevant today as to the Mau- Mau Raiders.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Lewis Henry is the product of a caring community in Barbados. He migrated to the UK in response to the need for workers to help rebuild Britain after World War II. Encouraged by his family, he pursued education at several universities in search of answers to the social challenges he encountered. He taught at secondary and tertiary institutions before establishing a skills training and enterprise centre in Birmingham. Then, as Caribbean Director of the Commonwealth Youth Programme, he provided educational and financial resources to help recipients create a better world. Now retired, he continues to inspire youth through his writing. |
![]() | ![]() | Franklyn, David. Children of the Sea. London. 2009. Heinemann. 9780435215194. Caribbean Writers Series. 104 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Set in Grenada, Children of the Sea is the story of three siblings and their adventures as they spend their summer holiday with their grandparents on Isle de Ronde. Danny, Caryn and Didi are enjoying the long summer days having fun in and around the ocean, but things turn serious when their father goes missing at sea.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Franklyn was born in Grenada and presently resides in Barbados. He works for the United Nations. He has previously worked as a teacher and lecturer. |