Sam Selvon (1923-1994) was a Caribbean novelist and short-story writer of East Indian descent, known for his vivid depictions of the life of East Indians living in the West Indies and elsewhere. Born in Trinidad, he came to public attention during the 1950s with a number of other Caribbean writers. During World War II, Selvon worked as a wireless operator for the Royal Navy on ships that patrolled the Caribbean. In 1965, he published The Housing Lark. He died in 1994 in Port of Spain.

Foreword Author Bio: Caryl Phillips is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Lost Child (2015), Dancing in the Dark, Crossing the River, and Color Me English. His novel A Distant Shore won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize; his other awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in New York.

Introduction Author Bio: Dohra Ahmad is Professor of English at St. John's University. Her areas of research and teaching interest include comparative immigrant literature, World Anglophone literature, American literature, utopian fiction, postcolonial theory, and World Literature pedagogy. She is the editor of Rotten English: A Literary Anthology (2007).