News, The University of the West Indies at Cave Hill

Students at Cave Hill will have the coveted opportunity to receive instruction from a Caribbean literary icon when internationally-acclaimed Barbadian writer George Lamming takes up position as writer-in-residence at the Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination next week.

As the Distinguished Honorary Fellow in Creative Writing at the centre, Lamming will deliver weekly seminars on creative writing. He will also deliver a number of public lectures, conduct relevant work as patron and consultant editor with Bim Arts for the 21st Centruy and be available, by appointment, to staff and students for consultations.

Lamming has been recognised by the University through having 2008 designated as the ‘Year of George Lamming’ at the Cave Hill campus; as well as having the pedagogical centre at the Errol Barrow Centre re-named as The George Lamming Pedagogical Centre. The Campus will further honour the celebrated writer when it hosts the UWI George Lamming International Symposium later in the academic year.

Director of the EBCCI Professor Gladstone Yearwood said: “Lamming is a national treasure and his residence will help the Centre to strengthen its work in the arts and develop its programme in creative writing. He added that Barbados’ wider arts community would also benefit from Lamming’s visit through the fiction writing master class, which starts next week.

Lamming has led a distinguished career as a Caribbean intellectual, literary artist, teacher, poet, novelist, broadcaster and critic. He published his first and most highly acclaimed novel, In the Castle of My Skin in 1953. This was followed by The Emigrants (1954), Of Age and Innocence (1958), Season of Adventure (1960), Water with Berries (1970) and Natives of My Person (1971). Among his non-fiction writings, are three important collections of critical essays The Pleasures of Exile (1960), Conversations: Essays, Addresses and Interviews 1953-1990 (1992) and Conversations II: Western Education & the Caribbean Intellectual (2000). He has contributed to many important literary journals, both poetry and short fiction anthologies and has edited the Barbados and Guyana Independence issues of New World Quarterly and Cannon Shot and Glass Beads: Modern Black Writing.

Lamming has received numerous recognitions, fellowships and awards including the Somerset Maugham Award for literature; a Guggenheim Fellowship; the Brachaman Award from Yale University, the Martin Luther King Award the Casa de Las Americas Award and the Henry Sylvester Williams Award, Trinidad, for outstanding Achievement in the Pan African Century. He has also held numerous prestigious academic positions and lectured at universities in the region, the United States and as far afield as Denmark, Tanzania and Australia.