Anne Walmsley (1931–2025)

The editor, critic, author, and scholar of Caribbean literature Anne Walmsley died on the 12^th of July. Anne Walmsley (1931–2025) wrote the pioneering study The Caribbean Artists Movement 1966–1972: A Literary and Cultural History (1992). Walmsley worked as a secretary at Faber & Faber in London in the late 1950s for T.S. Eliot and others. She was Longman’s first editor for the Caribbean and worked as schoolteacher in Jamaica at Westwood High School from 1959 to 1963. She compiled the anthology The Sun's Eye: West Indian Writing for Young Readers (1968), one of the earliest and most widely used text books aimed at Caribbean school children and teenagers including poems written in English creole and national oral languages. She was a lifelong interlocutor with Kamau Brathwaite and participated in the Caribbean Artist Movement (CAM) itself in London in the 1960s. The Caribbean Artist Movement 1966–1972 is one of the sources I have cited the most in my own research. The book has also been a big inspiration for the focus of this project. I had never heard about CAM and many other Caribbean authors that I now write about before Anne Walmsley introduced me to them when I spent two weeks at her house in Wimbledon cataloguing parts of her book collection while I was a DPhil-student in Oxford writing a dissertation about Linton Kwesi Johnson. I am very grateful for having experienced her intellectual generosity, patience, and belief in young people. Anne Walmsley will be deeply missed.