 In the mid-1950s Salkey taught English at Walworth Secondary School (also known as Mina Road school), an early comprehensive just off the Old Kent Road in South-east London.His first novel, "A Quality of Violence" – set around 1900 in a remote area of Jamaica, and narrated in a Jamaican patois – was published in 1959, and his second, "Escape to An Autumn Pavement", in 1960.That same year Salkey edited one of the first anthologies of Caribbean short stories, "West Indian Stories", and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of folklore and popular culture.