Multicultural English literature

A number of writers have used life in the former British colonies as the background for their novels. Some British novelists of Indian or Caribbean ethnic origin write about how they see the two different cultures.

English literature has also benefited from the work of Indian, African and Asian authors who write in English and who write novels from the point of view of the colonised, rather than the colonisers. Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian author, wrote Things Fall Apart (1958). They story tells how an important man in the Obi tribe is forced, by his own people, to leave his village because he does not want white, English missionaries to come. Arundhati Roy is an Indian writer, who wrote a well-known book The God of Small Things (1997), which is set in India. The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi (1990) is the story of a young British boy, with an Indian father and a British mother, growing up in a London suburb.

Michael Vaughan-Rees, Geraldine Sweeney, Picot Cassidy: In Britain. 21st Century Edition, Cornelsen Verlag, 2000, page 52