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Samuel Selvon (1923– 16 April 1994) was a Trinidad-born writer. Selvon was educated at Naparima College, San Fernando before moving to London, England in the 1950s, and later to Alberta, Canada. He is known for novels such as The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Moses Ascending (1975). His novel A Brighter Sun (1952), detailing the construction of the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway in Trinidad through the eyes of young Indian worker Tiger, was a popular choice on the CXC English Literature syllabus for many years. Other works include Ways of Sunlight (1957), Turn Again Tiger (1958) and Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972).

Selvon spent some years living as a writer-in-residence at the University of Calgary in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He was largely ignored by the Canadian literary establishment, with his works receiving no reviews during his residency.

The Lonely Londoners, as with most of his later work, focuses on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and the cultural differences which are often subtle and implicit to the dying Empire's fantasy of a "white nation". Selvon also illustrates the panoply of different "cities" that are lived in London, as with any major city, due to class and racial boundaries. In many ways, his books are the precursors to works such as Some Kind of Black by Diran Adebayo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Samuel Selvon", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0