A Caribbean publisher's radical beacon.

• Author: Sankar, Celia
• Position: Profile on John La Rose

Writer-activist John La Rose has been a guiding force in bringing emerging as well as classic West Indian and African writers into the international limelight

Caribbean publisher John La Rose enjoys telling of how he didn't live up to early expectations. "When I was in school, my father wanted me to be a doctor. My mother wanted me to be a priest. But I . . .," he says with a laugh, "I didn't want to be anything." And so he became many things.

This August La Rose celebrates thirty years in the risky business of publishing. As one of the few Caribbean-born publishers, he has been responsible for giving voice to new talent and new life to old, sometimes forgotten regional fiction and nonfiction classics.

But the Trinidadian poet and essayist has many more anniversaries to mark. La Rose can also look back on five decades as a radical politician and trade unionist. He agitated against colonial rule in the 1940s and led thousands in protest marches in London against police oppression in the 1980s. He is, even today, the European representative of a leading Trinidad trade union, a job he does voluntarily.

Last year he marked the twelfth anniversary of the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books. Established by La Rose in 1982 and directed by him since then, it has become the focal activity in London for African, Caribbean, and Black American writers. It has attracted participants such as Nigerian Nobel Prize - winner Wole Soyinka, his countryman Ben Okri, Trinidadian novelists Earl Lovelace and Samuel Selvon, and American jazz poet Jayne Cortez.

The Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o once wrote of him: "John La Rose is immensely aware of the revolutionary potential of literature and culture in the world today. As a writer, publisher, and cultural activist he has helped in the growth of many writers in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and America. Rarely has anybody come into contact with him without being affected by his generous, searching, modern, renaissance spirit."

La Rose founded his publishing house, New Beacon Books, on the ground floor of his house in North London in 1966. One year later he opened a specialist book shop, carrying titles about the Caribbean, Africa, Black Britain, Europe, and America.

Publishing was a dream he had harbored in Trinidad, but he could not get the support of the colonial financial institutions. Originally, he moved to London to study law. But he was prompted to follow his publishing ambitions by news that John Wickham, a friend and the editor of Barbados's literary magazine Bim, had a novel turned down by all the London publishers to whom he submitted it.

"That really riled me," La Rose says. "I knew that John was a good writer. But he couldn't get published because the London publishers were not interested in our writing. I felt that we had to publish ourselves. It was the only way we could validate what we were doing."

For La Rose, the issue went beyond the struggle of emerging West Indian writers to have their work recognized by British publishers. "Colonial policy was based on a deliberate withholding of information...