George Lamming

George Eric Lamming was born in Carrington Village, Saint Michael, Barbados, on the eighth of June 1927. He was the only child of his Barbadian mother and a father he never knew. He took his secondary education at Combermere School and worked as a teacher in Trinidad through the late 1940s.

He emigrated to London in April 1950 alongside Sam Selvon (also placed in this archive). The two writers shared the lower-class Caribbean immigrant lodging of post-war London together while writing the first wave of Caribbean novels in English.

Lamming's first novel, In the Castle of My Skin (1953), is the principal novel of Caribbean colonial childhood and is among the foundational works of post-colonial literature in English. The book — drawing on Lamming's own Barbadian boyhood under the late colonial system — established the formal technique through which post-colonial fiction would render the political conditions of its setting through the consciousness of a child narrator. It received the Somerset Maugham Award in 1957 and has been continuously in print for seventy-one years.

His subsequent novels — The Emigrants (1954), Of Age and Innocence (1958), Season of Adventure (1960), Water with Berries (1971), and Natives of My Person (1972) — extended the analytic technique across the political conditions of Caribbean independence, the Black British migration, and the post-independence betrayal. His essay collection The Pleasures of Exile (1960) is the founding theoretical work of Caribbean post-colonial literary criticism.

He held writer-in-residence and visiting professor positions at the University of the West Indies, the University of Texas, Cornell, and Brown across the 1970s and 1980s. He retired to Barbados in the 1990s and continued to lecture and write.

He died at his home in Barbados on the fourth of June 2022, four days before his ninety-fifth birthday.

He is honored here as the founding novelist of Caribbean post-coloniality.