Ferdinand Dennis FRSL (born 18 March 1956)[2] is a writer, broadcaster, journalist and lecturer, who is Jamaican by birth but at the age of eight moved to England, where his parents had migrated in the late 1950s.
[3] Dr James Procter notes: "Perhaps as a result of his Caribbean background (a region probably marked more than any other by movements and migration), Dennis is a writer ultimately more concerned with routes than roots.
[2] His writing has been published in a range of magazines, newspapers and anthologies, among them The Guardian,[16] Granta,[17] Critical Quarterly,[18] Black British Culture and Society: A Text Reader (ed.
In praise of 1998's Duppy Conqueror, World Literature Today said: "Ferdinand Dennis is faultless in his depiction of artifacts, customs, speech, and behavior in the three continents of Marshall's adventures; his descriptions of the externals and his analyses of the internal motivations of his characters–both minor and principal–are quite arresting, whether he is writing about 'the unintended arrogance of the shy person' or commenting on 'love that came without duty and expired without money, leaving a rancid odour of guilt.'
Duppy Conqueror is neither a bildungsroman nor a political treatise, though it shares some of the elements of both subgenres; it is almost a fictional biography of a sixty-year-old thinking proletarian searching for racial and ideological roots.
"[26] Calling Voices of the Crossing (2000) "a fine anthology of 14 memoirs by writers from Africa, the Caribbean, India and Pakistan" (E. A. Markham, Attia Hosain, Beryl Gilroy, John Figueroa, David Dabydeen, Mulk Raj Anand, Dom Moraes, Buchi Emecheta, Rukhsana Ahmad, G. V. Desani, Homi Bhabha, James Berry, Farrukh Dhondy and Nirad Chaudhuri), the New Statesman reviewer Robert Winder wrote: "...the memoirs in this book, while not the major works of any of the writers concerned, might be as significant as their more ambitious work....
"[27] On the publication of his 2021 book The Black and White Museum, Margaret Busby described Dennis as "[a] writer inspired by the idea and realities of Africa and the African diaspora, which he has explored in novels, short stories and travelogues, creating a unique body of work that deserves greater recognition",[20] while Maya Jaggi's review in The Guardian said that the collection "confirms Ferdinand Dennis as a flâneur and urban philosopher exploring territory he first began to map in his now classic novels.