George Lamming of Barbados is a world renowned intellectual, writer, critic and educator. Lamming, chosen as the 2004 Distinguished Lecturer at the University of the West Indies, is currently
Visiting Professor in the Africana Department at Brown University.
He has held many prestigious academic positions including 1998-2000 scholar-in-residence at City College of the University of New York where he delivered the Langston Hughes Lecture at the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City. Other recipients of the distinguished Langston Hughes Festival Award include James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou.
Lamming exploded onto the literary scene in 1953 with his first novel In the Castle of My Skin which won the Somerset Maugham Award for literature, and was championed by leading writers and intellectuals such as Jean Paul Satre and Richard Wright. In the Castle of My Skin, a novel about a Caribbean childhood and the realities of colonialism remains the most widely read of West Indian novels. Lamming, author of six novels, describes himself as a "political novelist" and has been closely involved in the political and cultural events of the Caribbean and Commonwealth over the last 50 years, remaining an astute critic and commentator on political, historical and cultural events.
He along with such scholars as Stuart Hall is a leader in the quickly expanding fields of Migration and Diaspora studies. Lamming will open the Moving Islands Literary Festival by giving the inaugural Islands of Globalization keynote address.