The West Indies

Abstract

Many West Indian novelists who began writing in the fifties continued to produce fiction in the seventies and eighties. Some of the best known, V. S. Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, Wilson Harris, Jan Carew and Andrew Salkey, who had immigrated to England, continued to live abroad. Others, like John Hearne and George Lamming, who had also immigrated to England, returned to the West Indies; while Vic Reid and Michael Anthony never emigrated; and Roger Mais and Edgar Mittelholzer unfortunately died. But new writers emerged in the West Indies, and also in Britain and North America, where young immigrants themselves and the children of West Indian immigrants began to write; Harold Sonny Ladoo, Neil Bissoondath, Caryl Phillips, David Simon, David Dabydeen and many others.