George Lamming, a giant of modern Caribbean writing, dies at age 94

NEW YORK — George Lamming, a giant of post-colonial literature whose novels, essays and speeches influenced readers and peers in his native Barbados and around the world, has died at age 94.

His death this month was confirmed by Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, who said, “Wherever George Lamming went, he epitomized that voice and spirit that screamed Barbados and the Caribbean.” No cause of death was given.

Along with such contemporaries as Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, Kamau Brathwaite and John Hearne, Lamming was among a generation of post-World War II writers from the West Indies who came of age as British rule in their region was being challenged and spent at least part of their 20s in England. But unlike Naipaul, who settled in London and at times wrote disdainfully of his origins, Lamming returned home and became a moral, political and intellectual force for a newly independent country seeking to tell its own story.

“There is a kind of English which is used, say, in official situations, in the civil service context, in the context of parliament, in the context of school, and so on,” he once wrote. “But there was always, in any given territory, another kind of English, the English of popular speech, the language which the mass of population use.”

Lamming had a broad, connective vision he would say was inspired in part by the Trinidadian historian-activist C.L.R. James. His calling was to address the crimes of history, unearth and preserve his native culture and forge a “collective sense” of the future.