Tony Deyal Was Last Seen... - Anthony Deyal

Anthony (Tony) Deyal wrote his first newspaper column, “Blackadaisical”, in 1974 for “The Charlatan”, the student newspaper of Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. After graduating with First Class Honours in Journalism, Tony ended up working for the Prime Minister’s Office in Trinidad as the Television Producer and then, after a stint as a Hubert Humphrey Fellow at Boston University, he became a consultant and, subsequently, the Communications Advisor to the World Health Organisation in Barbados in 1993. There he started a new humorous weekly column in the Barbados Nation which has been running for more than 28 years and is carried by the Jamaica Gleaner and many other newspapers in the English-speaking Caribbean and elsewhere. His end-tag, “Tony Deyal Was Last Seen” has become his trade-mark signoff for his weekly Saturday column, and his cartoon of being chased in his “Mini-Moke” by a blood-thirsty dog is known by millions of people in and out of the Caribbean.

Professor Emeritus Kenneth Ramchand, who as a young lecturer in English created the literary space now known as “West Indian Literature”, said of Tony’s work, “Tony Deyal is the most widely read columnist in the English-speaking Caribbean and its diaspora. Of the pure humourists I have read, only Mark Twain is in the same rank as Tony Deyal. Deyal is a serious writer not only because he is careful of craft but also because his comedies are fired by deep social, cultural and political concerns. They are referred to as columns because that is the format in which they appear, but they are stories. This columnist is a story-teller in disguise. In all the islands, Tony discovers and embraces the deep structural commonalities, and the bold features on the surface that bind the people of the region into one Caribbean.”