George Lamming
George Lamming was a Barbadian novelist, essayist, and poet. In 2008, Lamming was awarded CARICOM's highest award, the Order of the Caribbean Community (OCC).
Born on June 8, 1927 in Carrington Village, Barbados, George Lamming attended Roebuck’s Boys’ School from which he won a scholarship to Combermere High School. There, fostered by his teacher Frank Collymore, publisher of the literary journal BIM, who permitted Lamming to use his private library, Lamming developed a passion for reading and began his literary career as a poet.
Lamming is the author of several of the most important Caribbean novels of all time, including In the Castle of My Skin (1953), The Emigrants (1954), Of Age and Innocence (1958), Season of Adventure (1960), Water with Berries (1971) and Natives of My Person (1972). He left the Caribbean for England in 1950, and is the author of the seminal prose work, The Pleasures of Exile, which explores the relationship between the West Indian writer and absence from the region. He is recognised as one of the Caribbean’s most important thinkers on the issues of political and cultural independence. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Pennsylvania and a lecturer in Denmark, Tanzania, and Australia and granted several honorary doctorates. He continues to visit and lecture in the USA, but is now mostly resident in his native Barbados.
George Lamming died on 4th June 2022.
