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Earl Lovelace was born in Toco,
Trinidad in
1935, and spent his childhood in Tobago and Port of Spain. His first job
was as a proofreader with the Trinidad Publishing Company, and he later
joined the Civil Service, serving first in the Forestry Department and
then in the Department of Agriculture.
His first novel, While Gods Are Falling, won him the BP
Independence Literary Award which enabled him to study in the United
States as visiting novelist at Howard University. It was followed by
The Schoolmaster, a novel which drew on his experiences in
rural Trinidad. The promise evident in these novels of the sixties was
fulfilled in The Dragon Can't Dance, and The Wine of
Astonishment which, a West Africa magazine argued, "put him in the
front rank of Caribbean writers." It was followed by a collection of
plays, Jestina's Calypso, published in 1984, and a short
story collection, A Brief Conversation & Other Stories,
published in 1988. Lovelace, who is presently a Visiting Professor at
Wellesley College, was awarded the 1997
Commonwealth Writers' Prize for his latest novel
Salt.
