George Lamming

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George Lamming (photography by Carl van Vechten , 1955)

George Eric Lamming CHB (* 1927 in Carrington Village, Saint Michael ) is a writer from Barbados whose main theme in his novels is the encounter between people of color and Europe .

Life

After attending school, Lamming completed a degree and then worked as a teacher in Barbados and then in Venezuela , before moving to Great Britain in 1950 . There he worked as a worker in a factory and moderated a literature program on the BBC radio program for the West Indies .

Starting with his debut novel In the Castle of My Skin (1953) he explored the experiences of immigrants from the West Indies in a complex and highly structured way and continued this in The Emigrants (1954), which was published in 1956 under the title With the Gulf Stream appeared in a German translation by Janheinz Jahn . However, the ignorance of most readers about the background and the special linguistic sociolects of his first novels meant that they received little attention. In 1955 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to support his literary work financially and was one of a number of young Caribbean- born authors who immigrated to Great Britain, including CLR James , VS Naipaul and Samuel Selvon .

In Season of Adventures (1960), which was published in German translation in 1962 as Zeit der Abenteuer , he thus presented his own dilemma as an artist. In 1967 he was appointed Writer in Residence and Lector at the University of the West Indies (UWI) and taught at the Creative Arts Center of the Faculty of Education there . He was also a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin , University of Pennsylvania and Brown University and a university lecturer in Australia , Denmark and Tanzania .

The novel Natives of My Person , published in 1972, with its archaic vocabulary and mythical roots, is likely his tour de force.

For his services to the literature and culture of his home country and the Caribbean, he was named Companion of Honor of the Order of Barbados in 1987 and the Order of the Caribbean Community in 1998. In 2011 the Cuban artists' association Unión Nacional de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC) honored him with the first-ever Caribbean Hibiscus Prize for his life's work.

Publications

  • In the Castle of My Skin. 1953
  • The emigrants. 1954
    • With the Gulf Stream. Novel. Translated from the English by Janheinz Jahn . Hanser, Munich 1956
  • Of Age and Innocence. 1958
  • Season of Adventure. 1960
    • Time of adventure. Novel. Translated from English by Waltraud Neuhäuser. Blanvalet, Berlin 1962
  • The Pleasures of Exile. 1960
  • Water with berries. 1971
  • Natives of my person. 1972
  • Cannon shot and glass beads: modern black writing. 1974
  • George Lamming in Suriname. 1980
  • Conversations: Essays, Addresses and Interviews 1953-1990. 1992
  • Coming, Coming Home: Conversations II - Western Education and the Caribbean Intellectual. 1995; New edition 2000
  • Sovereignty of the Imagination: Conversations III - Language and the Politics of Ethnicity. 2004; New edition 2009

literature

  • Sandra Pouchet Paquet: The Novels of George Lamming. Heinemann, 1982, ISBN 0435918311
  • Chambers Biographical Dictionary. Edinburgh 2002, ISBN 0550-10051-2 , p. 884
  • Bertelsmann Universal Lexicon. Volume 10. Gütersloh 1990, p. 255

Web links and sources

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Maya Jaggi: Nightfall vision that has grown ever darker . In: The Guardian . October 12, 2001
  2. ^ Caryl Philips: Kingdom of the Blind . In: The Guardian . July 17, 2004
personal data
SURNAME Lamming, George
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lamming, George Eric (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Barbadian writer
DATE OF BIRTH 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Carrington Village, Saint Michael , Barbados