Andrew Salkey

Felix Andrew Alexander Salkey was born in Colón, Panama, on the thirtieth of January 1928, to Jamaican parents — Andrew Alexander Salkey, a businessman working in Panama, and Linda Marshall Salkey, a teacher. Sent to Jamaica as a small child, he was raised there by his mother and grandmother, and educated at St George's College in Kingston and at Munro College in St Elizabeth.

In the early 1950s Salkey went to England, attending the College of St Mark and St John in London. He settled into the literary life of the capital, teaching English in a South London school while writing, and by the 1960s and 1970s had become a central voice of the BBC World Service Caribbean section at Bush House, where his broadcasts became a celebrated showcase for a generation of Caribbean writers.

A prolific author and editor, Salkey produced more than thirty books — novels for adults and children, poetry, anthologies, travelogues and essays. In 1966, together with John La Rose and Kamau Brathwaite, he co-founded the Caribbean Artists Movement, a landmark platform for the writers, artists and musicians of the Caribbean and its diaspora, championing Black awareness and cultural self-validation.

From the 1970s he taught in the United States, holding a lifetime post as writer-in-residence at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he died on the twenty-eighth of April 1995. He is honored as a builder of movements and a keeper of the Caribbean voice, whose generosity lifted countless others into the light.