Born in Georgetown, British Guiana, the son of a Barbadian mother and a Guyanese father, Walrond was well-travelled, moving early in life to live in Barbados, and then Panama, New York City, and eventually England.

He made a lasting contribution to literature, his most famous book being Tropic Death, published in New York City in 1926 when he was 28; it remains in print today as a classic of its era.

Following training as a secretary and stenographer, he was employed as a clerk in the Health Department of the Canal Commission at Cristóbal, and as a reporter for the Panama Star-Herald newspaper.

Walrond published his first short story called "The Palm Porch", which describes a brothel in the Canal Zone, where a merciless plot to take over the land unfolds.

[5] After he left the hospital, he was involved in a theatrical production at London's Royal Court Theatre in the aftermath of the 1958 Notting Hill race riots.

After his death, which occurred while he was living in reduced circumstances, his early literary work has enjoyed wider recognition, as reflected in Winds Can Wake up the Dead... and The Penguin Book of Caribbean Short Stories, both published in the 1990s, In Search of Asylum, which appeared in 2011, and in James Davis' 2015 biography.

At the time, however, his passing appears to have gone relatively unnoticed, although Arna Bontemps wrote of his death, from a fifth heart attack, in a letter to Langston Hughes, dated 1 September 1966.