“My historical novels seek to redress colonial interpretations of history, to add to our understanding of a pain that remains just below the surface of contemporary life, due largely to racism and to the unacknowledged events of past colonial history.”
Novelist and short-story writer
My ‘Queer’ novels and their critics
Constructing painful experiences to bring about a repair of the self
Lawrence Scott in conversation with Nicole-Rachelle Moore
In reflecting on his expansive literary career, Lawrence Scott, focuses on Dangerous Freedom, his novel about the historical figure Dido Belle.
Biography
Lawrence Scott is a prize-winning novelist from Trinidad & Tobago. His most recent novel is Dangerous Freedom (2021). He was awarded a Lifetime Literary award in 2012 by the National Library of Trinidad & Tobago for his significant contribution to the literature of Trinidad and Tobago. He was elected as a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature in 2019.
His second novel Aelred’s Sin (1998) was awarded a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Best Book in Canada and the Caribbean (1999). His first novel Witchbroom (1992) was a BBC ‘Book At Bedtime’ and was translated into French as Balai de Sorcière (2020).
His other novels are Light Falling on Bamboo (2012) and Night Calypso (2004). His collections of short stories Leaving by Plane Swimming Back Underwater (2015) and Ballad for the New World (1994) were awarded the Tom-Gallon Award by The Society of Authors (1986).
He is the editor of Golconda Our Voices Our Lives (2009), a collection of stories, poems and archival photographs collected through a Public History project on the Golconda sugarcane estate in Trinidad (UTT Press, 2009). His poems are published in a number of journals and anthologies.
