D'Aguiar, Fred

(1960- )

   Poet, novelist and playwright, he was born in London to Guyanese parents, lived in Guyana with his grandparents in Airy Hall, a little town about 40 miles away from Georgetown, until he was 12, then returned to England. He trained as a psychiatric nurse before reading African and Caribbean studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury, graduating in 1985. His first collection of poetry, Mama Dot (1985), established his reputation as one of the finest British poets of his generation. That and Airy Hall (1989) won him the Guyana Poetry Prize in 1989, the first of many awards. His novel The Longest Memory (1994), which tells the story of an eighteenthcentury slave, was adapted for television and televised by Channel 4 in the U.K. He was Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Cambridge University England (1989-1990); visiting writer at Amherst College, Massachusetts, USA (1992-1994); and assistant professor of English at Bates College, Lewiston, Maine, USA (1994-1995). He is currently professor of English and creative writing at the University of Miami. Some of his poems: "Airy Hall Icongraphy," "Airy Hall's Exits," "GDR," "Langston," "Letter to England," "On Duty," "Sound Bite."

   Sources: Biography of Fred D'aguiar (http://www.humboldt.edu/D'Aguiar, Fredme2/engl240b/student_projects/daguiar/daguiarbio.htm). British Council Arts (http://www.contemporarywriters.com). Caribbean Poetry Now. Stewart Brown, ed. Edward Arnold, 1992. Other British and Irish Poetry Since 1970. Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain. ed. Wesleyan University Press, 1999. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry. Stewart Brown, and Ian McDonald, ed. Heinemann, 1992. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English. Paula Burnett, ed. Penguin Books, 1986. Wheel and Come Again: An Antholog y of Reggae Poetry. Kwame Dawes, ed. Goose Lane Editions, 1998.