Samuel "Sam" Selvon was a Trinidad-born writer. His 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners is groundbreaking in its use of creolised English, or "nation language", for narrative as well as dialogue.
Life and work
Samuel Dickson Selvon was born in San Fernando in the south of Trinidad, the sixth of seven children. His parents were Indian: his father was a first-generation ChristianTamil immigrant from Madras and his mother was a Christian Anglo-Indian. His maternal grandfather was Scottish and his maternal grandmother was Indian. He was educated at Naparima College, San Fernando, before leaving at the age of 15 to work. He was a wireless operator with the local branch of the Royal Naval Reserve from 1940 to 1945 during the Second World War. Thereafter, he moved north to Port of Spain, and from 1945 to 1950, worked for the Trinidad Guardian as a reporter and for a time on its literary page. In this period, he began writing stories and descriptive pieces, mostly under a variety of pseudonyms, including Michael Wentworth, Esses, Ack-Ack, and Big Buffer. Much of this early writing is to be found in Foreday Morning. Selvon moved to London, England, in 1950, where he took menial jobs eventually working as a clerk for the Indian Embassy, while writing in his spare time. His short stories and poetry appeared in various publications, including the London Magazine, New Statesman, and The Nation. In London he also worked with the BBC, producing two television scripts, Anansi the Spiderman, and Home Sweet India. Selvon was a fellow in creative writing at the University of Dundee from 1975 until 1977. In the late 1970s Selvon moved to Alberta, Canada, and found a job teaching creative writing as a visiting professor at the University of Victoria. When that job ended, he took a job as a janitor at the University of Calgary in Alberta for a few months before becoming writer-in-residence there. He was largely ignored by the Canadian literary establishment, with his works receiving no reviews during his residency. On a return trip to Trinidad Selvon died of respiratory failure due to extensive bronchopneumonia and chronic lung disease on 16 April 1994 at Piarco International Airport; his ashes were subsequently interred at the University of the West Indies cemetery, St Augustine, Trinidad. Selvon married twice: in 1947 to Draupadi Persaud, with whom he had one daughter, and in 1963 to Althea Daroux, with whom he had two sons and a daughter.
Writing
Selvon is best known for his novels The Lonely Londoners and Moses Ascending. His novel A Brighter Sun, detailing the construction of the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway in Trinidad through the eyes of young Indian worker Tiger, was a popular choice on the CXCEnglish Literaturesyllabus for many years. Other notable works include the collection of stories Ways of Sunlight, Turn Again Tiger and Those Who Eat the Cascadura. During the 1960s and 1970s, Selvon converted several of his novels and stories into radio scripts, broadcast by the BBC, which were collected in Eldorado West One and Highway in the Sun. The Lonely Londoners, like most of Selvon's later work, focuses on the migration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and tells, mostly in anecdotal form, the daily experience of settlers from Africa and the Caribbean. Selvon also illustrates the panoply of different subcultures that exist within London, as with any major city, due to class and racial boundaries. In many ways, his books are the precursors to works such as White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi. Selvon explained:
"When I wrote the novel that became The Lonely Londoners, I tried to recapture a certain quality in West Indianeveryday life. I had in store a number of wonderful anecdotes and could put them into focus, but I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along."
