The Anglophone Caribbean

In the fifties a generation of writers from the British Caribbean took the boat to London, where a BBC programme published and paid them. Out of that exile came books inventing a prose in the rhythm of Creole speech: Selvon's lonely Londoners follow immigrants who laugh and shiver, Lamming tells of a Barbadian village seen by a child, Wilson Harris travels up a Guyanese river into myth. Derek Walcott would carry this voice to the Nobel in 1992, rewriting the Odyssey in the Caribbean.

works 7

• NovelA Morning at the OfficeEdgar Mittelholzer · 1950A morning's work in Trinidad, where everyone measures themselves against others by colour and rank.Literature
• NovelIn the Castle of My SkinGeorge Lamming · 1953Barbados is still a British colony, and a nationalism is born in the villages of the thirties and forties.Literature
• NovelThe Hills Were Joyful TogetherRoger Mais · 1953The life of a wretched Kingston yard, written by a journalist whom the colonial authorities had imprisoned.Literature
• NovelThe Lonely LondonersSamuel Selvon · 1956Britain has opened its doors to the subjects of its empire, and West Indians are arriving in London in large numbers.Literature
• NovelA Quality of ViolenceAndrew Salkey · 1959A drought, Afro-Christian cults and the violence of a Jamaican village, seen from London by an exile.Literature
• NovelPalace of the PeacockWilson Harris · 1960A rising of the waters of the Guyanese forest, between dream and drowning, in the memory of the conquest.Literature
• TheatreDream on Monkey MountainDerek Walcott · 1970In the years of independence, a Saint Lucian poet based in Trinidad stages the self-shame that colonisation left behind.Literature