Kamau Brathwaite, originally, L. Edward, was born in Barbados in 1930. He read History at Cambridge between 1950-53, and received a Ph D at the University of Sussex in 1968. In between, he worked in Ghana between 1955-1962, discovering that much more of Africa had survived the middle passage to the Caribbean than most West Indians either realised or acknowledged.
As a historian, his Creole Society in Jamaica 1770-1820(1971) remains one of the most important reconceptualisations of Caribbean history in his insistence on the role of African slaves in the creation of social and cultural institutions which nativised plantation society.
As a literary critic his occasional essays (collected in Roots (1993), including 'Jazz and the West Indian Novel', 'The African Presence in Caribbean literature') and monographs such as Contradictory Omens (1979) and History of the Voice (1984) are landmarks in providing Caribbean writing with an aesthetic and context of its own.
However, it is through his poetry that his wider international reputation has been made. In Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968) and Islands (1969), collected into The Arrivants in 1973, Brathwaite explored the Africa/Caribbean dynamic and the region's historical legacy. His second major trilogy, Mother Poem (1977), Sun Poem (1982) and X/Self (1987), revised and collected into Ancestors in 2001, explores aspects of Brathwaite's own Barbadian heritage.
From the early 1990s he has taught at New York University and lived mainly in the United States.