Samuel Selvon

Samuel Selvon (1923-16 April 1994) was a Trinidad-born writer. Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners is ground-breaking in its use of creolized English, or « nation language », for narrative as well as dialogue. As he explained: « When I wrote the novel that became The Lonely Londoners, I tried to recapture a certain quality in West Indian everyday life. I had in store a number of wonderful anecdotes and could put them into focus, but I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along.

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