News for Babylon

News for Babylon: the Chatto book of Westindian-British poetry was a 1984 anthology of West Indian and black British poetry, edited by James Berry and published by Chatto & Windus. The anthology included work by Wilson Harris, Faustin Charles, Rudolph Kizerman, Valerie Bloom, John Agard, Fred D'Aguiar, Samuel Selvon, E. A. Markham,[1] Grace Nichols, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Archie Pool and Benjamin Zephaniah. A Poetry Review reviewer commented on the way that the language seemed "to slip unselfconsciously from Creole to standard English between or within poems, creating a dialogue or polyphony of discourses in which the unequal encounter of two cultures is directly enacted."[2]

The anthology quickly sold out. Though never reissued, it "remains a standard text in educational institutions teaching colonial and post-colonial literature".[1]