Notting Hill is a district of West London, England, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Notting Hill is known for being a cosmopolitan and multicultural neighbourhood, hosting the annual Notting Hill Carnival and the Portobello Road Market. From around 1870, Notting Hill had an association with artists.
A House for Mr Biswas is a 1961 novel by V. S. Naipaul, significant as Naipaul's first work to achieve acclaim worldwide. It is the story of Mohun Biswas, a Hindu Indo-Trinidadian who continually strives for success and mostly fails, who marries into the influential Tulsi family only to find himself dominated by it, and who finally sets the goal of owning his own house. It relies on some biographical elements from the experience of the author's father.
Harold Sonny Ladoo was a Caribbean novelist, who was the author of two books documenting the struggles of living in poverty in the Hindu communities of Trinidad and Tobago. He moved to Canada in 1968 and was mysteriously murdered while on a visit to Trinidad in 1973.
Miguel Street is a collection of linked short stories by V. S. Naipaul set in wartime Trinidad and Tobago. The stories draw on the author's childhood memories of Port of Spain. The author lived with his family in the Woodbrook district of the city in the 1940s, and the street in question, Luis Street, has been taken to be the model of Miguel Street. Some of the inhabitants are members of the Hindu community to which Naipaul belonged. Naipaul also draws on wider Trinidadian culture, referring to cricket and quoting a number of lyrics by black calypso singers.
Samuel Selvon was a Trinidad-born writer, who moved to London, England, in the 1950s. His 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners is groundbreaking in its use of creolised English, or "nation language", for narrative as well as dialogue.
Rudolph Malcolm Walker is a Trinidadian-British actor, best known for his roles as Bill Reynolds in Love Thy Neighbour (1972–1976) and Constable Frank Gladstone in The Thin Blue Line (1995–1996), as well as his long-running portrayal of Patrick Trueman on the BBC soap opera EastEnders (2001–present), for which he received the 2018 British Soap Award for Outstanding Achievement. He also provided voiceovers for both the British and American versions of Teletubbies (1997–2001). Walker's feature film credits include 10 Rillington Place (1971), Bhaji on the Beach (1993), and Ali G Indahouse (2002). He runs The Rudolph Walker Foundation, a charity designed to help disadvantaged youths find careers in entertainment, and was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2021.
Roy Samuel Williams is a British playwright.
Edgar Austin Mittelholzer was a Guyanese novelist. He is the earliest professional novelist from the English-speaking Caribbean. He was able to develop a readership in Europe and North America, as well as the Caribbean; and established himself in London, where he lived almost exclusively by writing fiction. He is considered "the most prolific novelist to be produced by the Caribbean".
Andrew Salkey was a Jamaican novelist, poet, children's books writer and journalist of Jamaican and Panamanian origin.
Seepersad Naipaul was a Trinidadian writer. He was the father of writers V. S. Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul and Savi Naipaul Akal, and married into the influential Indo-Trinidadian Capildeo family.
George William Lamming OCC was a Barbadian novelist, essayist, and poet. He first won critical acclaim for In the Castle of My Skin, his 1953 debut novel. He also held academic posts, including as a distinguished visiting professor at Duke University and a visiting professor in the Africana Studies Department of Brown University, and lectured extensively worldwide.
Adrian Igonibo Barrett is a Nigerian writer of short stories and novels. In 2014, he was named on the Africa39 list of writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define future trends in African literature. Following his two collections of short stories – From Caves of Rotten Teeth (2005) and Love Is Power, or Something Like That (2013) – his first novel, Blackass, was published in 2015, described by the Chicago Review of Books as "Kafka with a wink".
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was a Trinidadian-born British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English. He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker novels of alienation in the wider world, and his vigilant chronicles of life and travels. He wrote in prose that was widely admired, but his views sometimes aroused controversy. He published more than thirty books over fifty years.
The Monkey King is the debut novel of Timothy Mo, originally published in London in 1978 by André Deutsch. It was subsequently released through other UK and US publishers – including Faber & Faber, HarperCollins, Random House/Doubleday hardcover (1980), Vintage – before being self-published by the author under the Paddleless Press imprint in 2000. Comic and ironic in style, the novel was chosen by Hilary Bailey of the New Fiction Society and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1979.
In the Castle of My Skin is the first and much acclaimed novel by Barbadian writer George Lamming, originally published in 1953 by Michael Joseph in London, and subsequently published in New York City by McGraw-Hill. The novel won a Somerset Maugham Award and was championed by eminent figures Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Wright, the latter writing an introduction to the book's U.S. edition.
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is a novel by Elizabeth Taylor. Published in 1971, it was her eleventh novel. It was shortlisted for the 1971 Booker Prize. The novel was adapted for television in 1973 and was the basis for a 2005 film, also called Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont.
Odafe Atogun is a Nigerian writer. His debut novel, Taduno's Song (2016), was selected for the BBC Radio 2 Book Club, and he has been compared to Franz Kafka and George Orwell in critical reviews. Following his two-book deal with Canongate, Penguin Random House and Arche Verlag, Atogun's second novel, Wake Me When I’m Gone, was published in 2017. His work has been translated into several languages.
Mohamed Ismith Khan, better known as Ismith Khan, was a Trinidad and Tobago-born American author and educator. He is best known for his novel The Jumbie Bird, a semi-autobiographical work which blends Indian and Afro-Caribbean mythology and experience to explore the creation of a new Indo-Caribbean identity.
Ola Opesan is a Nigerian-British writer, journalist and educationist. He published his first novel, Another Lonely Londoner (1991), under the pseudonym Gbenga Agbenugba.
Because They Know Not is a novel by Jamaican author Alvin Gladstone Bennett. Inspired by Bennett's interactions with the Caribbean immigrant community after his migration from Jamaica to Britain in 1954 and first published in 1959, the novel is billed as a "powerful story on the colour problem" and a "novel that will long be remembered" on the front and back covers respectively.
All page references are to the 2006 Penguin "Modern Classics" edition.
