Samuel Selvon

Samuel Selvon (1923–1994) was a Trinidad-born writer. Selvon was educated at Naparima College, San Fernando before moving to London, England in the 1950s, and later to Alberta, Canada. He is known for novels such as The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Moses Ascending (1975). His novel A Brighter Sun (1952), detailing the construction of the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway in Trinidad through the eyes of young Indian worker Tiger, was a popular choice on the CXC English Literature syllabus for many years. Other works include Ways of Sunlight (1957), Turn Again Tiger (1958) and Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972).

Selvon spent some years living as a writer-in-residence at the University of Calgary in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He was largely ignored by the Canadian literary establishment, with his works receiving no reviews during his residency.

The Lonely Londoners, as with most of his later work, focuses on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and the cultural differences which are often subtle and implicit to the dying Empire's fantasy of a "white nation". Selvon also illustrates the panoply of different "cities" that are lived in London, as with any major city, due to class and racial boundaries. In many ways, his books are the precursors to works such as Some Kind of Black by Diran Adebayo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi.

Bibliography

• A Brighter Sun (1952)
• An Island is a World (1955)
• The Lonely Londoners (1956)
• Ways of Sunlight (1957)
• Turn Again Tiger (1959)
• I Hear Thunder (1963)
• The Housing Lark (1965)
• The Plains of Caroni (1970)
• Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972)
• Moses Ascending (1975)
• Moses Migrating (1983)
• Foreday Morning (1989)
• Eldorado West One, collected one-act plays (1989)
• Highway in the Sun and Other Plays (1991)

Filmography (as writer)

• Pressure (1976), co-written with Horace Ové

Criticism

Critical works on Selvon include:

• Clement Wyck, Sam Selvon's dialectal style and fictional strategy, (1991).
• Margaret Paul Joseph, "Caliban in Exile: The Outsider in Caribbean Fiction," (1992).
• Austin Clarke, Passage back home: a personal reminiscence of Samuel Selvon, (1994).
• Mark S. Looker, Atlantic Passages: history, community, and language in the fiction of Sam Selvon, (1996).
• Roydon Salick, The Novels of Samuel Selvon, (2001).

References

• Selvon, Sam (1984). Moses Ascending. London: Heinemann. p. i. 
• Peepal Tree Press biography of Sam Selvon

External links

• Pressure at the British Film Institute's Screenonline

This Trinidadian biographical article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v • d • e

This article about a Caribbean writer, poet or playwright is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v • d • e