Sam Selvon

Samuel Dickson Selvon

1950–78

Sam Selvon was born on 20 May 1923 in San Fernando, Trinidad. His father, Bertwyn Fraser Selvon, was of Madrasi Indian heritage and his mother, Daisy Irene Dickson, was of dual heritage, her father a Scotsman and mother, Keasoo, of South Asian origin. In 1939, after finishing school, he trained as a wireless operator with the Trinidad Royal Naval Reserve. After the end of the Second World War, he worked for the Sunday Guardian as its literary editor and wrote newspaper columns for the Evening News. He married Draupadi Persaud in 1947.

Three years later, in 1950, Selvon moved to Britain, joining many writers from the Caribbean who made Britain their home. While in London, Selvon was a central figure in London’s literary scene. His wife joined him in 1951 and their daughter was born there in 1952. After their divorce, Selvon married Althea Nesta Daroux, who was born in Bhopal, with whom he had three children.

While in Britain, Selvon was a regular contributor to Una Marson and Henry Swanzy’s Caribbean Voices programme. To earn a living, he continued to write features and short stories for a range of magazines and newspapers, including the Evening Standard, London Magazine, New Statesman and The Nation. Selvon’s relationship with the BBC stretched across his twenty-eight years in London. He wrote over twenty radio plays, some broadcast weekly, as well as scripts for television, including Anansi the Spider Man and Home, Sweet India. For Horace Ové he scripted Pressure (1976), the first full-length Black British feature film. In the late 1960s Sam Selvon became involved with the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) alongside founders Kamau Brathwaite, John La Rose and Andrew Salkey. The formation of CAM was influential in the future generation of a Caribbean cultural identity in Britain.

Selvon was a keen observer of the complexities of people’s lives. While his work is often closely associated with representations of the Black migrant experience from the Caribbean, his work also focuses on South Asian life in Trinidad – this is reflected in the short story, ‘Cane is Bitter’ and novels A Brighter Sun (1952), Turn Again Tiger (1958) and The Plains of Caroni (1970).

Selvon is especially known for charting the difficult process of making a home in Britain and his bittersweet portraits of the struggles faced by West Indian migrants to Britain. This is captured in his most acclaimed and widely known novel, The Lonely Londoners (1956), in which he introduces the character Moses, whose migratory journey he would revisit in two further novels, Moses Ascending (1975) and Moses Migrating (1983). He further expanded on migrant life in Britain in Ways of Sunlight (1957), a collection of short stories, and the novel The Housing Lark (1965). Selvon’s wide-ranging vision was pioneering in giving voice to the challenges facing South Asian and Black British migrants. Through his use of an iconoclastic irony and subversive humour, he centred the lives of communities whose histories are linked to the South Asian history of indenture and the African experience of enslavement.

Selvon held the post of Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Dundee from 1975 to 1977 and he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Warwick in 1989. In 1978, becoming increasingly disenchanted with life in Britain, he moved with his wife to Canada. Selvon died in Trinidad in 1994 on a short trip to visit his family.