Barbados has left mourning with the death of novelist, essayist and poet George Lamming, who passed away yesterday (June 4) at age 94.

Lamming, a noted figure in Caribbean literature, first won critical acclaim with the publication in 1953 of his debut novel, In the Castle of My Skin.

He also 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.

BROADCASTER FOR BBC COLONIAL SERVICE

“Barbados will miss George Lamming — his voice, his pen, and of course, his signature hairstyle — but I pray that the consciousness of who we are that he preached in all that he wrote will never fade from our thoughts,” said Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley.

In 1951, Lamming became a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial Service. His writings were published in the Barbadian magazine Bim, and the BBC’s Caribbean Voices radio series broadcast his poems and short prose. Lamming himself read poems on Caribbean Voices, including some by a young Derek Walcott.^[8]

In the Castle of My Skin was published in London in 1953 and won a Somerset Maugham Award and was championed by eminent figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Wright. 

Lamming was subsequently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and became a professional writer. He began to travel widely, going to the United States in 1955, the West Indies in 1956 and West Africa in 1958. His second novel, The Emigrants, (1954), which focuses on the migrants’ journey and the process of resettlement.

He would later write The Pleasures of Exile (1960) and Natives of my Person (1972).

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 in Jamaica. 

VISITING PROFESSOR

He has been a visiting professor in the United States at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Connecticut, Brown University, Cornell University, and Duke University and a lecturer in Denmark, Tanzania, and Australia. Lamming also directed the University of Miami’s Summer Institute for Caribbean Creative Writing.

In April 2012, he was chair of the judges for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and served as chief judge for the inaugural Walter Rodney Awards for Creative Writing 2014.