In the Anglophone world a West Indian literary renaissance came about in the 1950s because of the immigration of writers-to-be to Britain. Those writers were part of the “Windrush generation,” a popular designation for postwar immigration to the UK that derives from the name of a converted troopship, Empire Windrush, which began carrying West Indians and other emigrants to England in June, 1948. The Empire Windrush and the immigrant surge symbolize the beginning of contemporary multiracial and multicultural Britain, and a consequent reshaping of national identity. Windrush generation novelists, arriving in England between 1950 and 1959, include Samuel Selvon (1950), George Lamming (1950), V. S. Naipaul (1950), Roy Heath (1951), Andrew Salkey (1952), Roger Mais (1952), Michael Anthony (1954), and Wilson Harris (1959). They introduced new subject matter into representations of English life and new ways of thinking about English literary tradition.

To be sure, even before the postwar period West Indians and other British colonials with literary ambitions immigrated to England to find a forum for their work. West Indian C. L. R. James recalls in Beyond a Boundary a conversation in 1931 with famous cricketer Learie Constantine, who planned to emigrate, and remarks: “I too was planning to go to England as soon as I could, to write books.” This kind of immigration did not necessarily aim at rejection of some place or identity in exchange for a new one; but it almost always did involve surprising discovery and transformation. In 1931 Constantine and James had talked about almost nothing other than books and their shared passion for cricket; but five weeks after James's arrival in England, the friends began promoting the idea of West Indian self-government, having “unearth[ed] the politician in each other” (p. 116).