Faustin Charles

"He has been regularly published since 1969 but has not confined his talents to the written word. He is passionate about the culture, myths and folktales of the whole Caribbean area and has worked tirelessly to promote knowledge, interest and understanding amongst ex-patriots and his adopted countrymen alike.
He has been the Community Literacy Officer in Enfield since 1997 and has encouraged many youngsters to realise the richness and pleasure of the written word. He undertakes freelance engagements of storytelling and poetry reading and has enjoyed such diverse appointments as a creative writing fellowship at Warwick University and the writer in residence at Wormwood Scrubs. He is a charismatic and compelling storyteller touring schools and community venues.
He has published three collections of poetry and his work is in all the major anthologies of Caribbean verse. He has published two adult novel Sign Posts of the Jumbie and The Black Magic Man of Brixton.
More recently he has built a successful career as a writer for children, publishing both poems and stories with publishing houses such as Longmans, Penguin and Bloomsbury. His The Selfish Crocodile has now sold over 100,000 copies.

'Faustin Charles offers an utterance of his own, which promises to push the frontier of West Indian expression in poetry one understanding further on' Kamau Brathwaite.

'Faustin Charles' work seems to me outstandingly successful in capturing certain essentially West Indian qualities - the mixture of European and African cultures, of the bizarre and the beautiful, the grotesque and the sinister. The ""climate of the heart"", which West Indians know of but cannot always communicate, speaks clearly and delicately in his work.' Edward Lucie-Smith."