Novelist and essayist George Lamming, who did much to shape Caribbean literary culture, died June 4. He was 94. The Guardian reported that Lamming "also contributed to it as an educator and activist intellectual, mentoring a host of young writers and scholars in the Caribbean and beyond."
His first and best known novel, In the Castle of My Skin (1953), drew on his upbringing in Barbados and was published in Britain after he had gone there from Trinidad in 1950. The book's reception "put him at the center of Black intellectual and cultural life in postwar Europe," the Guardian noted. Three more novels soon followed: The Emigrants (1954), Of Age and Innocence (1958) and Season of Adventure (1960); as well as a pioneering collection of personal essays on cultural politics and intellectual history, The Pleasures of Exile (1960).
Lamming worked for the BBC's overseas radio service, broadcasting on its program Caribbean Voices, and in 1955 traveled to the U.S. on a Guggenheim scholarship, and then on to West Africa and the Caribbean. He was a participant in the first international congress of Black writers and artists in Paris in 1956. In 1957, he received the Somerset Maugham award for In the Castle of My Skin, and numerous honors and awards followed. His last two novels were Water With Berries (1971) and Natives of My Person (1972).
In 1980, he returned to Barbados and established a permanent residence at the Atlantis hotel in Bathsheba, where he "received occasional visitors and had time for reading, reflection and writing," the Guardian wrote. "On the public platform however, his voice remained strong and vigorous and politically challenging. He could be harsh in his assessments of Caribbean societies, but never surrendered his certainty about the creative potential of the region, and experimented with new fictional forms for themes that had always fascinated him."
Lamming edited anthologies of Caribbean writing and committed himself anew to political activism. This phase of his intellectual life is recorded in the essay collections Conversations (1992), Coming, Coming, Coming Home: Conversations II (1995) and The Sovereignty of the Imagination (2004), and in his edited volumes of Caribbean literary and cultural history, Enterprise of the Indies Vols I & II (1999). Many of his major works were republished in the U.S. in the 1990s.