Earl Wilbert Lovelace (born 13 July 1935) is a Trinidad and Tobago novelist, journalist, playwright, and short story writer.
[5] As Kenneth Ramchand has noted, "In the rural context [Lovelace] attended stick fights, wakes, village festivals and dances.
[12][13] In July 2015, to mark his 80th birthday, Lovelace was honoured by the NGC Bocas Lit Fest with celebrations in Tobago, including film screenings.
The Schoolmaster can be read as a celebration of the natural world and the attuned people in it; as a parable about the perils of transition from small island to modern nation; and most obviously as a satire about education in a colonial context.
"[5] Lovelace's 1979 novel, The Dragon Can't Dance, has been described as "a defining and luminously sensitive portrait of postcolonial island life.
"[20] Considered his best-known work, The Dragon Can't Dance is "a wildly exuberant paean to Trinidad’s carnival traditions and the calypsonians who challenged British rule in the wake of the second world war.
Hailing it as "something of an event", coming 15 years after his previous novel, Bernardine Evaristo wrote in The Guardian: "Lovelace is unusual among celebrated Caribbean writers in that he has always lived in Trinidad.
In his new novel, he turns his attention to the remote fictional village of Cascadu and the lives of ordinary individuals whose relationship to politics, their peers and their own weaknesses provide fascinating material.
"[2] Considered by the Financial Times reviewer to be a novel that "confirms Lovelace as a master storyteller of the West Indies",[21] Is Just a Movie won the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.
The papers mainly consist of typed and handwritten notes, drafts and manuscripts of Lovelace's published output — novels, plays and short stories.
Manuscripts of the following novels are included: The Schoolmaster; The Dragon Can't Dance; While Gods are Falling; The Wine of Astonishment; Salt.