E.A. Markham's iconic anthology Hinterland opened up new territory for many readers, with its substantial selections by 14 key poets with photos, interviews, essays by the poets themselves. It became a set text for the Open University and at many universities and colleges in Britain and the Caribbean. Since Markham compiled his selection over 30 years ago, the work of the poets he documents has become even more important, historically significant and highly influential. The poets featured - in depth - are Derek Walcott, Martin Carter, Louise Bennett, Kamau Brathwaite, Dennis Scott, James Berry, Mervyn Morris, E.A. Markham, Olive Senior, Grace Nichols, Lorna Goodison, Fred D'Aguiar, Michael Smith and Linton Kwesi Johnson. 'The product largely of offshore islands - Jamaica, Trinidad, Britain, etc (Guyana being the exception) - West Indian poetry in English has often been located on the fringes of the central experience. Its popularity is widely associated with local colour, linguistic and tonal innovation, thought to be lacking in the English "mainstream". This collection shows that the most vital and challenging poetry of the British Caribbean heritage is both local in its urgency and informed by a hinterland of experience deeper than the geography of the islands' politics.' - E.A. Markham, writing in 1989

Pewter Stapelton is drowning under a pile of marking. He teaches creative writing at a university in Sheffield, a campus peopled with malign cost-cutting accountants, baffled security staff and colleagues cloning themselves. As a novel about life and writing, factuality and invention rub shoulders to hilarious effect as Pewter is incessantly driven to turn his experiences, his friends and their experiences into works of drama and fiction.

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

When E.A. (Archie) Markham came to London in 1956 from his native Monserrat, his ambitions were to make it as a writer or pop singer, and at the same time, fulfil family expectations to become a scholar and academic. Unfortunately, the young Archie's attempts to combine elements of Little Richard and the now forgotten Jim Dale never found the success he was convinced they deserved, and it has been in less lucrative fields that Markham established his reputation as a 'nimble-footed, silver-tongued' poet, critic and fiction writer. His memoirs begin with a return to post-volcanic Montserrat to rediscover the now abandoned village of Harris and his grandmother's old house, and his meticulous and moving reconstruction of his boyhood in that house - a grand house that made the family feel that settling in the then working-class district of Maida Vale was a distinctly 'downwards' move for a cultivated Caribbean family. And, it is Markham's wryly humorous navigation between the poles of his family's confident sense of their worth and the racial bigotry they encountered that makes his account of his travails in the rag-trade, his pop-singer ambitions, the discovery that they were living next door to a leading member of the British Union of Fascists, and his involvement with the 'angry-young-men' shifts in 1950's British culture such a rewarding and human document.