A prolific writer and editor, he was the author of more than 30 books in the course of his career, including novels for adults and for children, poetry collections, anthologies, travelogues and essays.
Established and aspiring authors were chivvied, cajoled, gently chastised, inspired and schooled to produce new work for radio on the Caribbean Voices programme over which Andrew Salkey often presided.
"I was headed nowhere like a hundred million others: I had escaped a malformed Jamaican middle class; I had attained my autumn pavement; I had done more than my fair share of hurting, rejecting, and condemning; and I had created another kind of failure, and this time, in another country."
[2] As a Caribbean writer living in Britain, Salkey had this "insider-outsider" point of view, an expression often used when referring to the main character of his second novel, Escape to an Autumn Pavement.
But he did not only write about the conflicting identity of Caribbean people living in Britain, he also evokes queer themes, such as homosexuality, again in Escape to an Autumn Pavement.
[11] At the event, Robert Chrisman, editor of The Black Scholar, presented Salkey with the Black Scholar 25th Anniversary Award for Excellence in the field of Literature, and other presenters included broadcaster Trevor McDonald, publisher Eric Huntley, publisher/editor Margaret Busby, poet-novelist Edward Kamau Brathwaite, New Beacon Books founder John La Rose, writer E. A. Markham, CAM member Louis James, professor of feminist studies Jill Lewis, Arts Council literature director Alastair Niven, and Anne Walmsley, author of The Caribbean Artists Movement 1966–1971.
[17] On 29 March 2013, Paul Gilroy was meant to attend the Andrew Salkey Memorial Reading, at the Hampshire College Cultural Center, but could not due to adverse weather conditions.
[18] In August 2018, Salkey's poem "History and Away", from his collection Away: Poems (Allison and Busby, 1980), was among those by six poets (the others being James Berry, Kwame Dawes, Lorna Goodison, Grace Nichols, and Jean "Binta" Breeze) that were displayed on the London Underground in a set entitled "Windrush 70, A Celebration of Caribbean poetry" to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the arrival in Britain of the ship Empire Windrush from Jamaica in June 1948, marking the beginning of the most significant West Indian post-World War II migration to the UK.
[19][20][21] In April 2022, Margaret Busby and Raymond Antrobus discussed Salkey's work – in particular his 1960 novel Escape to An Autumn Pavement and his 1973 epic poem Jamaica – in the podcast Backlisted, presented by John Mitchinson and Andy Miller.