Andrew Salkey

Felix Andrew Alexander Salkey was born in Colón, Panama, on the thirtieth of January 1928, to Jamaican parents. He grew up in Jamaica and emigrated to London in 1952 to take his undergraduate degree in English at the University of London.

He published his first novel, A Quality of Violence (1959), and joined the BBC Caribbean Service in 1956 — where he produced the literary radio programs Caribbean Voices, A Round of Tunes, and Caribbean Magazine across the next twenty years. The radio work made him the principal curator of the post-war Caribbean literary moment in Britain; he produced the first BBC broadcasts of work by Derek Walcott (also placed in this archive), V. S. Naipaul, Wilson Harris, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, John Hearne, and dozens of others.

He co-founded the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) in 1966 alongside Edward Kamau Brathwaite and John La Rose. CAM operated as the principal organizational vehicle for Caribbean writers, painters, and musicians in Britain across the late 1960s and 1970s; its monthly meetings at the West Indian Students' Centre on Earls Court Square were the foundational gatherings of what came to be called the Black British literary movement.

Salkey produced eleven novels for adults and eight for children, multiple poetry collections, several travel books, and dozens of edited anthologies of Caribbean writing across his career. His Anancy's Score (1973) — a collection of West Indian folktales reset in modern Black London — remains the canonical collection of Anansi stories in English.

He moved to Hampton, Massachusetts, in 1976 to take a writer-in-residence position at Hampshire College. He taught there for the next nineteen years and edited the Caribbean Studies series for Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications through the 1980s and early 1990s.

He died of a heart attack at his Hampton home on the twenty-eighth of April 1995, age sixty-seven.

He is honored here as the broadcaster and editor who carried the post-war Caribbean literary movement onto BBC radio and into print.