Jan Carew is a poet, dramatist, and author both of fiction and nonfiction. Until recently he was best known for his novels, but with the publication of Grenada: The Hour Will Strike Again in 1985, he began to garner attention for his novelistic accounts of Caribbean history. A politically committed writer, Carew in Ghosts in Our Blood: With Malcolm X in Africa, England, and the Caribbean (1994) defines himself as "a Socialist, a Pan-Africanist, a Black Marxist, a nationalist who believes in the cultural unity of the Black world based on our common resistance to white racism."

Jan Rynveld Carew was born 24 September 1920 in the village of Agricola in Guyana (formerly British Guiana). He now holds dual Canadian-Guyanese citizenship. Carew's father had trained as a dentist in the United States but never practiced dentistry. Instead he worked as a tailor in Guyana while he indulged his passion for painting and...