Lenrie Peters

On 27 May 2009, the Gambian novelist, poet and surgeon Lenrie Peters passed away. Peters was born on 1 September 1932 in Bathurst (now Banjul) in The Gambia. Lenrie grew up in Bathurst and moved to Sierra Leone in 1949. In 1952 he went to study at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a BSc degree in 1956. Afterwards, he worked and studied at University College Hospital, London, and was awarded a medical and surgery diploma from Cambridge. 

While at Cambridge University he was elected president of the African Students' Union, and interested himself in Pan-Africanist politics. He also began writing poetry and plays, as well as starting work on his only novel, The Second Round. The novel was first published in 1965, and subsequently reprinted in 1966 as part of the influential Heinemann African Writers Series. The novel is semi-autobiographical, following the experience of a western educated doctor, Dr. Kawa, who returns to Freetown to practise medicine. The novel has overt Pan-Africanist political themes, and has been compared to Chinua Achebe's No Longer at Ease and the works of fellow Gambian-born Sierra Leonean William Conton.

Peters worked in hospitals in Guildford and Northampton before returning to the Gambia, where he had a surgical practice in Banjul and continued writing. He died in Dakar, Senegal, on 27 May 2009, aged 76.

(Source: Wikipedia accessed on 26 May 2026)

Selected publications

Barry, Cherno Omar, Lenrie Peters: trailblazer of Gambian literature (Leicester, 2016).

Djoleto, S. A. Amu, and Thomas Kwami, West African prose (London, 1972).

Peters, Lenrie, Poems (Ibadan, 1964).

Peters, Lenrie, Selected poetry (London, 1981).

Peters, Lenrie, Katchikali (London, 1971).

Peters, Lenrie, Satellites (London, 1967).

Raji, Wumi, and Tijan M Sallah, Contemporary literature of Africa: Tijan M. Sallah and literary works of The Gambia (Amherst, 2014).