Sam Selvon’s
The Lonely Londoners, first published by Alan Wingate in 1956, is a text frequently hailed as signalling the birth of modern black British writing. Selvon’s short fiction, now a standard text on many a university course on postcolonial Britain and black British literature, is not only ground-breaking in its representation of the life, culture and expectations of that early “Windrush generation” of West Indian migrants who came to Britain from the late-1940s; the book signals, as Caryl Phillips has noted (Nasta 2006: vi-vii), a key moment in the wider literary re-imagining of post-war Britain in the 1950s. The text stands both beside classic texts of postcolonial Britain such as Salman Rushdie’s
The Satanic Versesand Hanif Kureishi’s
The Buddha of Suburbia, and…
2588 words
Citation: Waters, Rob. "Lonely Londoners". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 04 October 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=33519, accessed 27 November 2024.]
