He has written widely on cricket, language, jazz, race, and social justice, and has taught in Canada, England, Tobago, Mozambique, and Grenada.

His 1972 work The Forsaken Lover: White Words and Black People, which won the Martin Luther King Prize, is based on his experience in Tobago.

[2] On returning to England in 1970, Searle taught in the East End, and was involved in the Stepney School strike of 1971[3] in the borough of Tower Hamlets.

Bishop had been involved in March 1979 with a coup by the Marxist New Jewel Movement, which suspended the country's constitution, and established a People's Revolutionary Government.

[8] According to John Berger: "At his best Searle's compassion, anger and sense of historical morality as a storyteller are reminiscent of the early Gorki.