Largely self-educated, Selvon was first a poet, later a journalist, and then a professional writer. In 1946 he became an editor at the Guardian Weekly in Trinidad. He left for England in 1950, where he wrote and published his first novel, A Brighter Sun (1952). This novel depicts the struggle of the protagonist, a newly married Indian peasant, to adapt to life in a suburban area. In Turn Again Tiger (1958), a sequel to his highly successful first novel, the protagonist of A Brighter Sun returns to his community with a deeper sense of place. Both novels explore his relations to his origins and the various layers of Trinidadian society. Moses Ascending (1975) is a humorous satire on the situation of the West Indian in London. Although his roots are in the nineteenth-century novel, Selvon has created a personal literary language out of the fusion of standard English with Creole folk language, just as he has joined the techniques of European fiction to the West Indian rhythms. Though he now lives in Calgary, Canada, Selvon continues to write about West Indians with humor and sensitivity and tries to communicate his view that all West Indians---in spite of racial diversity---have a common identity.
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