Stories by MICHELLE SPRINGER

READING is a political exercise.

Delivering the feature address at the 12th Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Awards ceremony, novelist, poet and scholar George Lamming offered a definition of politics beyond traditional partisan politics to the crowded auditorium of the Grande Salle at the Tom Adams Financial Centre.

The celebrated author, known world-wide for novels and essays, engaged invitees for 54 minutes with a paper entitled Politics And Reading.

"Politics is the way people go about organising their social relations among themselves and the way they negotiate the distribution of power and the appropriate exercise of that power," said the writer, once known for his fervent black Marxist perspective.

He added that the areas of health education, agriculture, urban planning were some of the elements of human activity associated with politics.

"Politics straddle a variety of what you understand as intellectual disciplines. Politics straddles economics, sociology and modern philosophy . . . . The three criteria that will establish a civilised society are free access to healthcare, free access to education and the assurance, of the appropriate employment during the citizens entire life," he said.

Expanding on the notion of free, he took care to point out his definition, one that reflected a view of the exploited labourer.

"Free is the removal of all the impediments to these entitlements which would have been paid for by the productive labour of all working citizens. Citizens don't recognise that when they hear about free education and health care, they have in fact been paying for this entitlement through their productive labour.

"What they do not also recognise is that workers receive an unfair proportion of the value of that from the state that exports it," he added.

He used this concept of politics to shape his argument on the importance of reading.

"The act of reading is, metaphorically speaking, an act of eating. The book is [like food], just as food has an influence on the physical metabolism, what one reads has an influence on different areas of the consciousness . . . .

"Reading shapes modes of thought and the way we perceive reality. Reading therefore is political. [It] negotiates the way we relate to society," he said.

A former student of the literary mogul Collymore, Lamming reminisced fondly about his days at Combermere School under Collymore's charge - reading excerpts from his work.

Lamming is also the patron and consultant editor of the relaunched BIM magazine, which was founded by Collymore.