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George Lamming of Barbados is a world renowned intellectual, writer,
critic and educator. Lamming, chosen as the 2004 Distinguished
Lecturer at the University of the West Indies, is currently Visiting
Professor in the Africana Department at Brown University.
He has held many prestigious academic positions
including 1998-2000 scholar-in-residence at City College of the
University of New York where he delivered the Langston Hughes Lecture
at the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York
City. Other recipients of the distinguished Langston Hughes Festival
Award include James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Alice
Walker, and Maya Angelou.
Lamming exploded onto the literary scene in 1953
with his first novel "In the Castle of My Skin" which won the Somerset
Maugham Award for literature, and was championed by leading writers
and intellectuals such as Jean Paul Satre and Richard Wright. "In the
Castle of My Skin", a novel about a Caribbean childhood and the
realities of colonialism remains the most widely read of West Indian
novels. Lamming, author of six novels, describes himself as a
"political novelist" and has been closely involved in the political
and cultural events of the Caribbean and Commonwealth over the last 50
years, remaining an astute critic and commentator on political,
historical and cultural events.
He along with such scholars as Stuart Hall is a
leader in the quickly expanding fields of Migration and Diaspora
studies. Lamming will open the Moving Islands Literary Festival by
giving the inaugural Islands of Globalization keynote address. |
George
Lamming