In this presentation, biographer James Davis (Brooklyn College - City University of New York) describes the peripatetic career of fiction writer and journalist Eric Walrond. Born in Guyana, raised in Panama during the canal construction era, Walrond established himself in New York, where he moved in 1918, just as the “Harlem Renaissance” movement in arts and politics was taking shape.

After publishing a pathbreaking book of Caribbean stories (“Tropic Death”, 1926) Walrond seemed destined for literary fame, but the Great Depression and the author’s own bouts of depression drove him across the Atlantic, first to France, then to England, where he lived the rest of his life. From 1939, when he was evacuated from wartime London, until 1957, Walrond resided in Wiltshire, one of the county’s few Black residents.

This presentation is an introduction to a reclusive but prolific Caribbean-American author who lived and wrote in Bradford on Avon and, for a time, in the Roundway Psychiatric Hospital in Devizes.