Fred D'Aguiar

Fred D'Aguiar (born 2 February 1960) is a British-Guyanese poet, novelist, and playwright. He is currently Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Fred D'Aguiar
Born (1960-02-02) 2 February 1960
London, England
OccupationPoet, novelist, playwright, Professor of English at Virginia Tech
Alma materUniversity of Kent (1985)
GenreFiction, poetry, stage plays
Notable worksPoetry:
Mama Dot
Airy Hall
Novels:
The Longest Memory
Notable awards

Life

Fred D'Aguiar was born in London, England, in 1960 to Guyanese parents, Malcolm Frederick D'Aguiar and Kathleen Agatha Messiah.[1] In 1962 he was taken to Guyana, living there with his grandmother until 1972, when he returned to England at the age of 12.[1][2][3][4]

D'Aguiar trained as a psychiatric nurse before reading African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury, graduating in 1985.[4] On graduating he applied for a PhD on the Guyanese author Wilson Harris at the University of Warwick, but – after winning two writers-in-residency positions, at Birmingham University and the University of Cambridge (where he was the Judith E. Wilson Fellow from 1989 to 1990) – his PhD studies "recededed from [his] mind" and he began to focus all of his energies on creative writing.[2][3]

In 1994, D'Aguiar moved to the United States to take up a Visiting Writer position at Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts (1992–94).[2][4] Since then, he has taught at Bates College, Lewiston, Maine (Assistant Professor, 1994–95) and the University of Miami where he held the position of Professor of English and Creative Writing.[2][4] In 2003 he took up the position of Professor of English and Co-Director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Virginia Tech. In the fall of 2015, he became a Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at UCLA, which post ended in 2019.[5]

Poetry, novels and plays

Poetry

D'Aguiar's first collection of poetry, Mama Dot (1985), was published to much acclaim.[1][4] It centres on an "archetypal" grandmother figure, Mama Dot, and was notable for its fusion of standard English and Nation language.[6] Along with his 1989 collection Airy Hall (named after the village in Guyana where D'Aguiar spent his childhood), Mama Dot won the Guyana Poetry Prize. Where D'Aguiar's first two poetry collections were set in Guyana, his third – British Subjects (1989) – explores the experiences of peoples of the West Indian diaspora in London.[7] London was also the focus of another long poem, Sweet Thames, which was broadcast as part of the BBC "Worlds on Film" series on 3 July 1992 and won the Commission for Racial Equality Race in the Media Award.[8]

After turning to writing novels rather than poetry for a period of time, D'Aguiar returned to the poetic mode in 1998, publishing Bill of Rights (1998): a long narrative poem about the Jonestown massacre in Guyana in 1979, which is told in Guyanese versions of English, fusing patois, Creole and Nation Language with the standard vernacular.[9] It was shortlisted for the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize. Bill of Rights was followed by another narrative poem, Bloodlines (2000), which tells the story of a black slave and her white lover.[4] His 2009 collection of poetry, Continental Shelf, centres on a response to the Virginia Tech Massacre in which 32 people were killed by a student in 2007.[10] It was a finalist for the 2009 T. S. Eliot Prize.[11]

Novels

D'Aguiar's first novel, The Longest Memory (1994), tells the story of Whitechapel, a slave on an eighteenth-century Virginia plantation. The book won both the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award.[12][13][14] It was adapted for television and televised by Channel 4 in the UK. Returning to themes he had earlier developed in British Subjects, D'Aguiar's 1996 novel, Dear Future, explores the history of the West Indian diaspora through a fictional account of the lives of one extended family.[15][16]

His third novel, Feeding the Ghosts (1997), was inspired by a visit D'Aguiar made to the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool and is based on the true story of the Zong massacre in which 132 slaves were thrown from a slave ship into the Atlantic for insurance purposes.[4][17] According to historical accounts, one slave survived and climbed back onto the ship; and in D'Aguiar's narrative this slave – about whom there is next to no historical information – is developed as the fictional character Mintah.[17]

His fourth novel, Bethany Bettany (2003), centres on a five-year-old Guyanese girl, Bethany, whose suffering has been read by some as symbolising that of a nation (Guyana) seeking to make itself whole again.[12][18] His 2014 novel Children of Paradise is a fictional reimagining of the Jonestown massacre told through the perspective of a mother and child living at the commune.[19]

Plays

D'Aguiar's plays include High Life, first produced at the Albany Empire in London in 1987, and A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death, performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1991. His radio play Mr Reasonable – about a freed black slave, a skilled silk weaver, who is engaged by Shakespeare to make theatrical costumes – was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 10 April 2015.[20]

Bibliography
  • 1985. Mama Dot. London: Chatto & Windus.
  • 1988. The New British Poetry 1968–88. Edited with Gillian Allnutt, Ken Edwards and Eric Mottram.
  • 1989. Airy Hall. London: Chatto & Windus.
  • 1993. British Subjects. London: Bloodaxe.
  • 1994. The Longest Memory. London: Chatto & Windus.
  • 1995. A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death (play). London: Methuen.
  • 1996. Dear Future. London: Chatto & Windus.
  • 1997. Feeding the Ghosts. London: Chatto & Windus.
  • 1998. Bill of Rights. London: Chatto & Windus.
  • 2000. Bloodlines. London: Chatto & Windus.
  • 2001. An English Sampler: New and Selected Poems.
  • 2004. Bethany Bettany, 2003. London: Chatto & Windus.
  • 2009. Continental Shelf. Oxford: Carcanet.
  • 2014. Children of Paradise. New York: Harper (publisher)

Prizes and awards

See also

References
  1. Stade, George; Karen Karbiener (2003). Encyclopaedia of British Writers, 1800 to the Present (Vol. II). New York: Facts on File. pp. 127–8. ISBN 9781438116891.
  2. Hyppolite, Joanne (2004). "Interview with Fred D'Aguiar". Anthurium. 2 (1). Retrieved 6 June 2012.
  3. Birbalsingh, Frank (1993). "An Interview with Fred D'Aguiar". ARIEL. 24 (1): 133–145.
  4. "Fred D'Aguiar". British Council Writers Profiles. British Council. Archived from the original on 23 January 2013. Retrieved 6 June 2012.
  5. Romanchuk-Kapralau, Marina (22 April 2015). "English department hires two new creative writing professors". Daily Bruin.
  6. O'Brien, Sean (1996). "A Necessary Gospel". London Review of Books. 11 (6): 24–5. Retrieved 9 June 2012.
  7. Salkey, Andrew (1994). "British Subjects by Fred D'Aguiar". World Literature Today. 68 (4): 864–5. doi:10.2307/40150782. JSTOR 40150782.
  8. Barfield, Stephen (March 2007). "'Post-Face': Reflections on the Literary Thames". The Literary London Journal. 5 (1). ISSN 1744-0807. Archived from the original on 27 September 2013. Retrieved 8 June 2012.
  9. Maes-Jelinek, Hena (2006). "Chapter 22: "Tricksters of Heaven" Visions of Holocaust in Jonestown and Fred D'Aguiar's Bill of Rights". The Labyrinth of Universality: Wilson Harris's Visionary Art of Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi. pp. 419–437 [421]. ISBN 9042020326.
  10. Bainbridge, Charles (19 September 2009). "Continental Shelf by Fred D'Aguiar". The Guardian (Review Section). p. 19. Retrieved 10 June 2012.
  11. Flood, Alison (22 October 2009). "T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlists Poets 'Who Have Dreamed and Who Have Dared'". The Guardian. Retrieved 2 June 2012.
  12. Edemariam, Aida (18 January 2003). "A Child Out of Time". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 June 2012.
  13. Frias, Maria (2002). "The Erotics of Slavery (A Review of Bloodlines)". Callaloo. 25 (2): 679–685, p. 684 (n.4). doi:10.1353/cal.2002.0069. S2CID 161663922.
  14. Gurnah, Abdulrazak (15 July 1994). "Resisting Ignorance". Times Literary Supplement. p. 22.
  15. King, Bruce (1997). "Dear Future by Fred D'Aguiar". World Literature Today. 71 (1): 206. doi:10.2307/40152753. JSTOR 40152753.
  16. Hathaway, Heather (1998). "Dear Future by Fred D'Aguiar". African American Review. 32 (3): 506–8. doi:10.2307/3042256. JSTOR 3042256.
  17. Frias, Maria (2002). "Building Bridges Back to the Past: An Interview with Fred D'Aguiar". Callaloo. 25 (2): 418–425 [421]. doi:10.1353/cal.2002.0068. S2CID 162386842.
  18. Jays, David (5 January 2003). "You can take the boy out of Guyana..." The Observer. Retrieved 9 June 2012.
  19. Scheeres, Julia (7 March 2014). "Devil's Deeds". The New York Times.
  20. "Mr Reasonable by Fred D'Aguiar", BBC Radio 4.

See also
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