George Lamming, a novelist and essayist who did much to shape Caribbean literary culture, died June 4 at age 94. His first and best known novel, In the Castle of My Skin (1953), drew on his upbringing in Barbados and was published in Britain after he had gone there from Trinidad in 1950. Three more novels soon followed: The Emigrants (1954), Of Age and Innocence (1958) and Season of Adventure (1960); as well as a pioneering collection of personal essays on cultural politics and intellectual history, The Pleasures of Exile (1960).
Lamming worked for the BBC's overseas radio service, broadcasting on its program Caribbean Voices, and in 1955 traveled to the U.S. on a Guggenheim scholarship, and then on to West Africa and the Caribbean. He was a participant in the first international congress of Black writers and artists in Paris in 1956. In 1957, he received the Somerset Maugham award for In the Castle of My Skin, and numerous honors and awards followed. His last two novels were Water With Berries (1971) and Natives of My Person (1972).
In 1980, he returned to Barbados and established a permanent residence at the Atlantis hotel in Bathsheba, where Lamming edited anthologies of Caribbean writing and committed himself anew to political activism. This phase of his intellectual life is recorded in the essay collections Conversations (1992), Coming, Coming, Coming Home: Conversations II (1995) and The Sovereignty of the Imagination (2004), and in his edited volumes of Caribbean literary and cultural history, Enterprise of the Indies Vols I & II (1999). Many of his major works were republished in the U.S. in the 1990s. In the Castle of My Skin is available from the University of Michigan Press ($19.95), along with several other of Lamming's books.