ABSTRACT
George Lamming was born on the former sugar estate of Carrington Vil-
lage, Barbados. He was educated on a scholarship at Combermere School
and in 1946 moved to Trinidad, where he worked as a teacher. In 1950 he
emigrated to England. There he became the host of a book review pro-
gramme for the BBC West Indian Service in London. Lamming published
his first novel, In the Castle of My Skin, in 1953. The book, which earned
him the Somerset Maugham Award in 1957, reads as both a memoir of an
individual’s childhood and the collective biography of a West Indian
village during the decline of the plantation system. Lamming’s work ranges
in tone from the despair of The Emigrants (1954) to the powerfully hope-
ful Season of Adventure (1960), and he explores the complexity of the
West Indian experience as affected by the process of decolonization and
national reconstruction. In Of Age and Innocence (1958) Lamming cites
the immigrant experience in Britain as a catalyst for social and political
change back in the Caribbean, and the non-fiction essays in his collection
The Pleasures of Exile (1960) describe the experience of a writer moving
from the Caribbean to a metropolitan culture.
