Lamming, George
Entry updated 27 June 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1927-2022) Barbadian poet, journalist and author, five of his six novels being nonfantastic; he remains best-known for the first of these, In the Castle of my Skin (1953), the semi-autobiographical narration of a Barbadian childhood, which has remained extremely influential. Water With Berries (1971) conveys a sense of the intermixture of lives and modes of a contemporary Black activist with a vivid, quasi-allegorical sense that each of these lives is inherently separate (see Fantastika). Lamming is of some sf interest for his last novel, Natives of My Person (1971), set in something like an Alternate World whose major powers are Antarctica and the Kingdom of Lime Stone; much of the action takes place in a confabulated nineteenth century aboard a ship whose crew (see Ship of Fools) is lugubriously incapable of handling the African men and women they have purchased for resale in the Islands of Black Rock, which is to say the Caribbean (see Imperialism; Slavery). [JC]
George William Lamming
born Carrington Village, Barbados: 8 June 1927
died Bridgetown, Barbados: 4 June 2022
works (highly selected)
- In the Castle of my Skin (London: Michael Joseph, 1953) [hb/]
- Water With Berries (Trinidad and Jamaica: Longman Caribbean, 1971) [hb/]
- Natives of My Person (Trinidad and Jamaica: Longman Caribbean, 1971) [hb/]
links
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