Sam Selvon

Samuel Dickson Selvon was born in San Fernando, Trinidad, on the twentieth of May 1923, the son of a Madrasi Indian father and a half-Scottish, half-Indian mother. He served as a wireless operator in the Royal Naval Reserve during the Second World War and worked as a journalist at the Trinidad Guardian through the late 1940s.

He emigrated to London in April 1950 — one of the early arrivals in the post-Empire Windrush generation. He published his first novel, A Brighter Sun (1952), shortly after his arrival; the book was widely reviewed and established him as one of the principal voices of the new Caribbean-British literary moment.

His third novel, The Lonely Londoners (1956), is the foundational novel of the Black British literary tradition. The book — narrated entirely in modified Trinidadian Creole rather than in standard literary English — was the first novel published by a British house to render the speech of working-class Black Britain as the language of its narrative rather than only of its dialogue. The opening sentence ("One grim winter evening, when it had a kind of unrealness about London, with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in the blur as if not London at all but some strange place on another planet") established the rhythm that subsequent Black British writers — Linton Kwesi Johnson, Caryl Phillips, Bernardine Evaristo — would draw on across the following six decades.

He published twelve further novels across his career, including Moses Ascending (1975) and Moses Migrating (1983) — the sequels that completed the Moses Aloetta trilogy he had begun in The Lonely Londoners.

He moved to Calgary, Alberta, in 1978 and taught at the University of Calgary through the 1980s. He died in Trinidad on the sixteenth of April 1994 while on a return visit, age seventy.

He is honored here as the founding novelist of Black British literature.