Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, first published by Alan Wingate in 1956, is a text frequently hailed as signalling the birth of modern black British writing. Selvon’s short fiction, now a standard text on many a university course on postcolonial Britain and black British literature, is not only ground-breaking in its representation of the life, culture and expectations of that early “Windrush generation” of West Indian migrants who came to Britain from the late-1940s; the book signals, as Caryl Phillips has noted (Nasta 2006: vi-vii), a key moment in the wider literary re-imagining of post-war Britain in the 1950s. The text stands both beside classic texts of postcolonial Britain such as Salman Rushdie&r…
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