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BBC radio’s Caribbean Voices began in 1939 as a program named Calling the West Indies which featured the voices of West Indian soldiers fighting in the British army sending messages to their loved ones over the air and across the sea. Under the direction of Una Marson the show was transformed into Caribbean Voices in 1943, where it became a fulcrum for the burgeoning literary culture of the Caribbean. Many of the region’s most important poets, novelists, and theorists, including Sylvia Wynter, Kamau Brathwaite, and Derek Walcott, were featured on the program early in their careers. Between 1943 and 1958 the program featured more than 200 authors, and its influence has been credited for a distinctive oral/aural culture within Anglophone Caribbean letters. Derek Walcott remembers that there was a virtuous circle between the program’s contributors and its listenership: “We all listened to Caribbean Voices because it was the BBC, it was the Sunday night program; it was a great outlet for young writers. They paid very well for us - they paid a guinea a minute, I think.” George Lamming, who read his own writing for the program as well as that of Walcott and others, noted a pattern in which Caribbean Voices would select writers from Bim, the Caribbean’s leading literary journal in its day, who were often persuaded by their success to relocate to the U.K. It was a pattern he likened to colonial extraction: “The BBC played a role of taking the raw material and sending it back, almost like sugar, which is planted there in the West Indies, cut sent abroad to be refined, and gets back in the finished form.” Towards the end of its life Caribbean Voices suffered from an increasingly insular and conservative editorship, and it was brought to a close in 1958.

Featured in the program are two texts created on opposite sides of the Atlantic, both with the theme of communication and navigation across the water. The first, The Boy and the Sea, is by George Lamming, who was a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial Service and who read his own poems over Caribbean Voices. The second, Letter to Lamming, by E.M. Roach, is a poem that, owing to its direct address to Lamming (who was a cornerstone of the program) could be interpreted as having been written for Lamming to hear via broadcast.

Written by Bill Corrigan, Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow 2025.