This monumental Memoir fills a literary gap. It is timely, informative, audaciously inventive, heroic and inspiring. At the age of nineteen, Ron Ramdin left his impoverished Trinidad village and arrived in England with little money and no job to go to. It was a huge leap in the dark. But undaunted, within a year after his arrival, he enrolled to study at the New Era Academy of Drama and Music, where he successfully performed a famous monologue from Shakespeare’s play Othello. After receiving a Diploma in Acting with ‘DISTINCTION,’ his examiners told him there were very few parts for Black Actors. He vowed to write his own lines. As his passion for writing grew, drawn to the struggle for Social Justice, he made history when he was elected as the first black Shop Steward in the British Museum; and two years later, as the first elected Secretary of the Whitley Council when the British Library was formed. Through his unprecedented radical leadership campaigns for Equal Opportunity in both national institutions, he became a ‘legendary’ figure, who was dubbed: ‘The Lenin of Museum Street.’
Hardened by experience, his focus on literature, scholarship and art widened and deepened. Necessarily, his writings crossed the boundaries of histories, identities and cultures which, in turn, led him to explore the true identity of William Shakespeare and eventually to write the first comprehensive, revolutionary Novel OR NOT TO BE: The True Story of William Shakespeare.
Taken together, Ron Ramdin’s multifaceted body of writings, has created a unique path in British and World Literature, reflecting essential historical and contemporary themes endemic in Society, and thus the Human Condition: for example, lack of respect for difference, Identity, Love, Home and Belonging.
As the British Library celebrates its first fifty years, Ron Ramdin looks forward to being at his regular Creative space, his Seat in the Rare Books Reading Room, where, as the next chapter of his extraordinary literary journey unfolds, he hopes that his pen will never be still…

Author; Ron Ramdin

Publisher ; Compass

ISBN; 978-095691359