George Lamming is Chief Judge of the Inaugural Walter Rodney Creative Writing Award
The Walter Rodney Foundation is proud to announce that George Lamming will be the Chief Judge that will make the final decisions and announcements as to the winner of each category of the inaugural Walter Rodney Awards for Creative Writing 2014. The Rodney Family and the WRF express sincere appreciation to Mr. Lamming for agreeing to serve in this capacity.
Lamming is a critically acclaimed writer and the recipient of numerous awards, accolades, and distinctions. His works include In the Castle of My Skin, The Emigrants, Of Age and Innocence, Season of Adventure, Water with Berries, and Natives of My Person, to name a few. In 2003, Lamming was made a Fellow of the Institute of Jamaica (IOJ). In 2011, he was awarded the first Caribbean Hibiscus Prize by the Association of Cuban Writers and Artists (UNEAC) in acknowledgment of his lifetime's work. In April 2012, Lamming was Chair of the judges for the One Caribbean Media (OCM) Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.
A highly political author, George Lamming is credited, along with Vic Reid, Wilson Harris, V.S. Naipaul, Everton Weekes, Derek Walcott, Garfield Sobers, Mighty Sparrow and others, with making the emergence of a Caribbean identity possible. Lamming sees the lack of cultural identity in this region as a direct result of the history of colonial rule. He opposes colonialism as well as neo-colonialism, recognizes that language is a means of colonization and encourages resistance to cultural imperialism “People are becoming aware that the overwhelming dominance of North American mass culture will destroy the society if there is not what one would call a force of cultural resistance to that.”
George Lamming was born in Barbados in 1927. Lamming attended Roebuck Boys' School and Combermere High School on a scholarship. Before moving to England, he worked from 1946 to 1950 as a teacher at El Colegio de Venezuela, a boarding-school for boys in Port of Spain, Trinidad. From London, Lamming eventually settled in Barbados. In 1967-68, Lamming was a Writer-in-Residence and lecturer in the Creative Arts Centre and Department of Education at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica.
Lamming has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Pennsylvania, Brown University as well as teaching courses at the University of Miami's Institute for Caribbean Creative Writing. During the past decade, Lamming has lectured extensively throughout the world, including Australia, India, Tanzania, Denmark and the United States.
The George Lamming Pedagogical Centre is housed in the Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination (EBCCI). The EBCCI celebrates the poet, novelist, essayist, orator, eternal educator, editor and activist of a new world order and pioneer in the West Indian Literary Arts in an effort to inspire the 21st Century artist, arts enthusiast and West Indian populace. The EBCCI is “pleased to continue the ingenious and novel evolution of the Caribbean identity; the Lamming Legacy” in holding its annual distinguished lecture series. The lecture is held annually in June, the month of George Lamming’s Birthday. Lamming’s works and personal literary collection is housed at the Sidney Martin Library, University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados, W.I.