The Bowling was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket

Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald present a multi-faceted portrait of the significance of cricket to the Caribbean and the attraction of Caribbean cricket to the outside world.

With poems, calypsos, stories, extracts from novels, essays, speeches and articles, the editors show cricket inhabiting all areas of the Caribbean imagination. From its expression at the highest level on the global field of play, to the no less titanic struggles on the bumpier fields of the village or the sugar estate, this is a celebration of those who forged an art out of a game, those who transformed a colonial sport into the cutting edge of Caribbean nationalism, and, in the 1970s and 80s changed forever the nature of the game.

"The Bowling Was Superfine is a gem. So purely cut, it sends light sparkling off in a hundred, different directions."

ESPN CricInfo

Stewart Brown has edited several anthologies of Caribbean writing, including The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry (with Ian McDonald, 1992) and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories (2009). He also edited The Art of Derek Walcott (Seren, 1995) and All are Involved: The Art of Martin Carter (Peepal Tree, 2000).

Ian McDonald is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has served as a judge for the Guyana Prize for Literature. He is the author of the 1969 novel The Hummingbird Tree (2004), which was recently made into a BBC film, four collections of poetry and a play.