George Lamming

Brief Bio

Born in Barbados in 1927, George Lamming is a novelist and essayist of international renown.  He is known above all for his six novels, In the Castle of My Skin (1953), The Emigrants (1954), Of Age and Innocence (1958), Seasons of Adventure (1960), Water With Berries (1971), and Natives of My Person (1972), as well as his long essay The Pleasures of Exile (1960).  In more recent years, he has performed the role of a public intellectual and many of his interviews and speeches have been brought together in the collections Conversations (1992) and, more recently, Coming, Coming, Coming, Home (1995).  He has taught creative writing at numerous institutions (such as Brown University where he is Distinguished Visiting Professor) and is currently serving as writer-in-residence at the Errol Barrow Centre for the Creative Imagination of the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies.

In his preface to a long interview with George Lamming, David Scott offers the following summary of the man and his work which it is worth quoting here:

there are fewer Caribbean writers . . . with a keener sense of the relations between writing and politics, between the moral exercise of criticism and the practical demands of decision making. Lamming's work as a writer and public intellectual is exemplary . . . for its preoccupation with the problem of the free exercise of the critical faculty, the public function of inducing thought . . . into the social and political life of the community. . . . ( Small Axe 12 [2002]: 74-75)