Samuel Selvon was born in San Fernando, Trinidad in 1923. Following the Second World War, he worked in Port of Spain as a journalist for the Trinidad Guardian. He lived in Great Britain from 1950 to 1978, a period during which he published most of his novels and wrote radio scripts that were broadcast by the BBC. In 1978, he moved to Canada where he lived until his death in 1994 during a return trip to Trinidad. In 2012 the NALIS (National Library of Trinidad and Tobago) posthumously awarded him a Lifetime Literary Award.
Fiction
A Brighter Sun
London: Longman Trade, 1979.
Fiction
Housing Lark: A Novel
Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1990.
PR9272.9 .S4 H68 1990
Publisher’s Synopsis (from its website)
Battersby, the hero of Selvon’s fifth novel, is a West Indian exile in London who encounters both hardships and amusing situations in his search for adequate and reasonably priced shelter. In Housing Lark Selvon explores the plight of the West Indian in the “Mother Country,” and the exiles’ interactions with English women, the British in general, and each other. First published in 1965.
Fiction
The Lonely Londoners
With an introduction by Kenneth Ramchand.
Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1985, c1956.
PS8587 .E5 L6 1985
Publisher’s Synopsis (from its website)
… from the brilliant, sharp, witty pen of Sam Selvon, this is a classic award-winning novel of immigrant life in London in the 1950s.
Fiction
Moses Migrating: A Novel
Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1983.
With an introduction by Susheila Nasta.
Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2009.
PS8587 .E5 M6 2009
Publisher’s Synopsis
It has been more than 25 years since Moses Aloetta became one of the “Lonely Londoners” in the novel of that name. Now–though an avowed Anglophile–he hankers for Trinidad, for sunshine, Carnival, and rum punch. With characteristic irony and delicacy of touch, Sam Selvon tells the story of Moses’s reencounter with his native land.
Awards and Honours
1984 Georges Bugnet Award for Novel-Alberta Literary Awards (Writers’ Guild of Alberta)(Winner)
Fiction
Turn Again Tiger
Introduction and study questions by Sandra Pouchet Paquet.
London: Heinemann, 1979, c1958
PS8587 .E5 T87 1979
Publisher’s Synopsis
[This] is a sequel to Samuel Selvon’s first novel, A Brighter Sun. The chief character remains the same and the themes of the earlier work are extended as well. A Brighter Sun is set in the suburban village of Barataria. It explores the growing consciousness of Tiger, a newly arrived youth from an estate village in the sugar belt of Chaguanas. This novel is concerned with Tiger’s quest for manhood and with the process of creolization which Tiger and his young bride, Urmilla, undergo in multi-racial Barataria away from the influence of their parents.
Fiction (Short stories)
Ways of Sunlight
With a critical introduction by Jane Grant
Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1987, c1957.
PS8587 .E5 W3 1987
Publisher’s Synopsis
The master-storyteller turns his pen to rural village life in Trinidad: gossip and rivalry between the village washerwomen; toiling cane-cutters reaping their meagre harvest; superstitious old Ma Procop protecting the fruit of her mango tree with magic. With equal wit and sensitivity, he reflects the depression of hard times in London, where people live in cold, damp basements, hustling for survival.
Selected Criticism and Interpretation
Agarwal, Supriya. “Conflict and Resolution: Selvon’s The Plains of Caroni.” In Writers of the Caribbean Diaspora: Shifting Homelands, Travelling Identities. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 2008, 152-163.
PR9205 .W75 2008
Beyond Calypso: Re-reading Samuel Selvon. Edited by Malachi McIntosh. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2016.
PS8587.E5 Z24 2016
Clarke, Austin. A Passage Back Home: A Personal Reminiscence of Samuel Selvon. Toronto: Exile Editions, 1994.
PS8587.E5 Z588 1994
Critical Perspectives on Sam Selvon. Edited by Susheila Nasta. Washington: Three Continents Press, 1988.
PS8587 .E5 Z6 1988
Forbes, Curdella. From Nation to Diaspora: Samuel Selvon, George Lamming and the Cultural Performance of Gender. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2005.
PR9210 .F67 2005
Joseph, Margaret Paul. “Caliban the Calypsonian: The Ballad of Sam Selvon” In Caliban in Exile: The Outsider in Caribbean Fiction. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992.
PR9205.4 .J67 1992
Mathur, Charu. “Creating an Independent Reality: Sam Selvon’s An Island is a World.” In Writers of the Caribbean Diaspora: Shifting Homelands, Travelling Identities. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 2008, 164-174.
PR9205 .W75 2008
Royar, M. Supriya. “Race of Races in Sam Selvon’s Those Who Eat the Cascadura.” In Writers of the Caribbean Diaspora: Shifting Homelands, Travelling Identities. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 2008, 142-151.
PR9205 .W75 2008
Salick, Roydon. Samuel Selvon. Tavistock, England: Northcote/British Council, 2013.
PR9272.9 .S4 Z885 2013
Sindoni, Maria Grazia. Creolizing Culture: A Study on Sam Selvon’s Work. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2006.
PS8587 .E5 Z74 2006
Wong, Mitali P. and Zia Hasan. “Identity and the Indo-Caribbean Experience: Themes, Genres, and Characters in the Fiction of V.S. Naipaul and Samuel Selvon.” In The Fiction of South Asians in North America and the Caribbean. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2004.
PS153 .S68 W66 2004
Wyke, Clement H. Sam Selvon’s Dialectal Style and Fictional Strategy. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1991.
Electronic book (Access restricted to the Toronto Metropolitan University community)
Zehnder, Martin, ed. Something Rich and Strange: Selected Essays on Sam Selvon. Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2003.
PS8587 .E5 Z76 2003
Links
Publisher Longman (Pearson Educational Ltd.)
Publisher Peepal Tree Press
Publisher Mawenzi House (formerly TSAR)