Professor Kamau Brathwaite (1930 - 2020)

Poet, alumnus and Honorary Fellow, Professor Kamau Brathwaite, died on Tuesday 4 February 2020, at the age of 89.

Professor Brathwaite was considered a major voice in Caribbean literature.

Born in Barbados in 1930, he came up to Pembroke in 1950, on a Barbados Island scholarship, to read History. He returned to the UK in 1966 to do a PhD at the University of Sussex. That same year he set up the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) with John La Rose and Andrew Salkey, to bring together Caribbean artists and writers living in the UK and spread wider awareness of their work amongst the wider British public.

He wrote a number of collections of poetry, including Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968), and Islands (1969) (combined into The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973)), Black + Blues (1976), Middle Passages (1992), and Elegguas (2010). His studies of black cultural life include Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica (1970); The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820 (1971); Contradictory Omens (1974); Afternoon of the Status Crow (1982); and History of the Voice (1984).

 

In 2006 Brathwaite was named International Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2006  for his volume of poetry Born to Slow Horses (2005). He's all the Casa de las Americas Prize for Literary Criticism, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, as well as fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Lord Smith of Finsbury, Master of Pembroke College said, “Kamau Brathwaite was a giant of Caribbean literature. Pembroke was immensely proud to count him as an alumnus and Honorary Fellow. We mourn his loss with great sadness.” 

In 2018, to mark his 88th birthday and the awarding of an Honorary Fellowship, the College Library mounted a display on Professor Brathwaite and his work. A blog post reflecting on the display can be read here.

Image copyright: New Directions Publishing