18 Facts About George Lamming

George William Lamming OCC was a Barbadian novelist, essayist, and poet.

George Lamming first won critical acclaim for In the Castle of My Skin, his 1953 debut novel.

George Lamming held academic posts, including as a distinguished visiting professor at Duke University and a visiting professor in the Africana Studies Department of Brown University, and lectured extensively worldwide.

George William Lamming was born on 8 June 1927 in Carrington Village, Barbados, of mixed Afro-Barbadian and English parentage.

George Lamming attended Roebuck Boys' School and Combermere School on a scholarship.

George Lamming left Barbados to work as a teacher from 1946 to 1950 in Port of Spain, Trinidad, at El Colegio de Venezuela, a boarding school for boys.

George Lamming then emigrated to England where, for a short time, he worked in a factory.

In 1951, George Lamming became a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial Service.

George Lamming's writings were published in the Barbadian magazine Bim, edited by his teacher Frank Collymore, and the BBC's Caribbean Voices radio series broadcast his poems and short prose.

George Lamming himself read poems on Caribbean Voices, including some by the young Derek Walcott.

George Lamming began to travel widely, going to the United States in 1955, the West Indies in 1956 and West Africa in 1958.

George Lamming's calling was to address the crimes of history, unearth and preserve his native culture and forge a 'collective sense' of the future.

George Lamming entered academia in 1967 as a writer-in-residence and lecturer in the Creative Arts Centre and Department of Education at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.

George Lamming directed the University of Miami's Summer Institute for Caribbean Creative Writing.

George Lamming died in Bridgetown, Barbados, on 4 June 2022, four days short of what would have been his 95th birthday.

George Lamming wrote six novels: In the Castle of My Skin, The Emigrants, Of Age and Innocence, Season of Adventure, Water with Berries, and Natives of My Person.

George Lamming's second novel, The Emigrants, was a sequel to his debut autobiographical work, following the life of the same protagonist as he travels from Barbados to England in search of better prospects and opportunities.

Much of George Lamming's work had gone out of print by the late 1970s, when Allison and Busby reissued several titles, including his 1960 collection of essays, The Pleasures of Exile, which attempts to define the place of the West Indian in the post-colonial world, re-interpreting Shakespeare's The Tempest and the characters of Prospero and Caliban in terms of personal identity and the history of the Caribbean.