Biography Essay

Sam Selvon is one of the important writers who contributed to the remarkable development of West Indian fiction in the 1950s and 1960s. His work has been studied by scholars from many countries. He wrote ten novels, two screenplays, several short stories, fiction for children, and radio and television plays. But even if he had written nothing else, A Brighter Sun (1952) and The Lonely Londoners (1956) assure him a permanent place in the history of West Indian literature.

Born in South Trinidad on 20 May 1923, Samuel Dickson Selvon, the son of an Indian father and a half-Indian, half-Scottish mother, graduated from San Fernando's Naparima College in 1938. Selvon grew up in Trinidad's multiracial society and considered himself a creolized West Indian, as he suggested in more than one interview. But he had a strong sense of displacement, and this feeling sometimes emerges as a strong theme in his fiction...