Earl Lovelace – författare

With Black Plays, Yvonne Brewster clearly demonstrated the need for a regular anthology to record the vitality of Black playwriting. For her second volume she has selected The Dragon Can't Dance, adapted from a novel by Earl Lovelace in which the inhabitants of Port of Spain, Trinidad, prepare to live out their dreams on Carnival Night; Winsome Pinnock's A Rock in Water, an energetic chronicle play about activist Claudia Jones, one of the founders of the Notting Hill Carnival; Blood, Sweat and Fears by Maria Oshodi which focuses on the problems of the ten per cent of Britain's black population who suffer from sickle cell anaemia and Job Rocking by Rastafarian poet Benjamin Zephaniah, a 'dub' opera set in and around a new style job club designed to sell the idea of work to the unemployed.

Winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize'An amazingly vivid and joyful novel.' The Times'Vital, life-enhancing.' Time OutAlford, the youngest son of a poor farm worker, has risen above his class to become a schoolteacher. He, like many young people in Trinidad, dreams of heading to England for a better life. Idealistic and determined, Alford travels to the capital to campaign for his community and, suddenly a local hero, it seems anything is possible. Or is it? Salt tells the story of a country through an unforgettable cast of characters, striving with wit and passion to make sense of life in an evolving homeland.

'A landmark, not in the West Indian, but in the contemporary novel.' C. L. R. James'First-class talent.' The VoiceTrinidad, 1970s. Calvary Hill - poverty stricken and rubbish-strewn ­­- is home to a community of people who come together during the joyful yearly town Carnival, becoming larger-than-life versions of themselves. But when it ends, and the strains of day-to-day life grow large, what happens to the peoples' hopes, and the feeling that 'all o' we is one'?With an unforgettable cast of characters, The Dragon Can't Dance is a stunning, classic novel of the desire for identity and belonging, alongside the legacies of a colonial past.

'Each word is a revelation.' The Times'Earl Lovelace is the real stuff, a proper writer.' James KelmanIn the sleepy village of Kumuca, Trinidad, change happens slowly. Yet to move with the times and expand the horizons of the villagers, the elders elect to build a school and bring in a schoolmaster with great celebration. The warnings of a local priest - that the quest for education will bring more to the village than they expect - are ignored. But the villagers will learn, all too cruelly, that progress can mean the destruction of what they know and love.

In Trinidad, in the wake of 1970's Black Power rebellion, we follow Sonnyboy, Singer King Kala, and their town's folk through experiments in music, politics, religion, and love and in their day-to-day adventures. Humorous and serious, sad and uplifting, Is Just a Movie, is a radiant novel about small moments of magic in ordinary life.Earl Lovelace's books include While Gods Are Falling, winner of the BP Independence Award; the Caribbean classic The Dragon Can't Dance; and Salt, which won the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize. For Is Just a Movie, he has won the Grand Prize for Caribbean Literature by the Regional Council of Guadeloupe and the 2012 OCMBocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.