Beryl Gilroy Biography

Guyanese novelist and autobiographical writer, born in Berbice, British Guiana (now Guyana). She moved to Britain in 1951, where she worked for the BBC Caribbean service. She later became a schoolteacher in London and a counselling psychologist. Her autobiographical book, Black Teacher (1976), hard-hitting, but often cheerful and humorous in tone, examines primary education and racial discrimination in Britain. Set in Guyana, her first novel, Frangipani House (1986), deals with ‘Mama King’, an elderly grandmother fighting to liberate herself from the eponymous ‘home’ for people like her, and also from her past. Compassionate, wry, and psychologically acute, yet fundamentally optimistic, the novel questions many current assumptions about old age. Her second novel, Boy Sandwich (1989), exposes how the elderly are treated in London. Sunlight on Sweet Water (1994) is a collection of short stories with an autobiographical undertone, set in British Guiana in the 1930s and 1940s. Love in Bondage: Steadman and Joanna (1991), a historical romance based on the journals of John Steadman, tells of the marriage of an eighteenth-century Dutch soldier to a slave-woman.