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Fred D'Aguiar

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Fred D'Aguiar
Born (1960-02-02) 2 February 1960 (age 64)
London, England
OccupationPoet, novelist, playwright, Professor of English at Virginia Tech
Alma materUniversity of Kent (1985)
GenreFiction, poetry, stage plays
Notable worksPoetry:
Mama Dot (1985)
Airy Hall (1989)
Novels:
The Longest Memory (1994)
Notable awards

Fred D'Aguiar (born 2 February 1960) is a British-Guyanese poet, novelist, and playwright of Portuguese descent.[1] He is currently Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Life

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Fred D'Aguiar was born in London, England, in 1960 to Guyanese parents, Malcolm Frederick D'Aguiar and Kathleen Agatha Messiah.[2] In 1962 he was taken to Guyana, living there with his grandmother until 1972, when he returned to England at the age of 12.[2][3][4][5]

D'Aguiar trained as a psychiatric nurse before reading African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury, graduating in 1985.[5] 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 "receded from [his] mind" and he began to focus all of his energies on creative writing.[3][4]

In 1994, D'Aguiar moved to the United States to take up a Visiting Writer position at Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts (1992–94).[3][5] 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.[3][5] 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.[6]

D'Aguiar fathers a son with fellow poet Jackie Kay.[7]

Poetry, novels and plays

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Poetry

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D'Aguiar's first collection of poetry, Mama Dot [8] (Chatto, 1985), was published "to much acclaim".[2][5] It centres on the eponymous "archetypal" grandmother figure, Mama Dot, and was noted for its fusion of standard English and Nation language.[9] 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.[8] Where D'Aguiar's first two poetry collections were set in Guyana, his third – British Subjects (1993) – explores the experiences of peoples of the West Indian diaspora in London.[10] 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.[11]

After turning to writing novels for a period of time, D'Aguiar returned to the poetic mode in 1998, publishing Bill of Rights (1998): a long narrative poem centred on the Jonestown massacre in Guyana (1979) told in several Guyanese versions of English, fusing patois, Creole and Nation Language with standard vernacular.[12] It was shortlisted for the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize. Bill of Rights was followed by another narrative poem, Bloodlines (2000), which revolves around the story of a black slave and her white lover.[5] 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.[13] It was a finalist for the 2009 T. S. Eliot Prize.[14]

Novels

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D'Aguiar's first novel, The Longest Memory (1994), tells the story of Whitechapel, a slave on an 18th-century Virginia plantation. The book won both the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award.[15][16][17] 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 in his 1996 novel, Dear Future, explores the history of the West Indian diaspora through a fictional account of the lives of one extended family.[18][19]

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.[5][20] 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.[20]

D'Aguiar's 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.[15][21] His 2014 novel Children of Paradise is a fictional reimagining of the Jonestown massacre, told from the perspective of a mother and child living at the commune.[22]

Plays

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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.[23]

Bibliography

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Prizes and awards

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See also

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References

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  1. ^ "The Rumpus Interview With Fred D'Aguiar - The Rumpus.net". therumpus.net. Retrieved 14 May 2023.
  2. ^ a b c 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.
  3. ^ a b c d Hyppolite, Joanne (2004). "Interview with Fred D'Aguiar". Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal. 2 (1): 6. doi:10.33596/anth.11. Retrieved 6 June 2012.
  4. ^ a b Birbalsingh, Frank (1993). "An Interview with Fred D'Aguiar". ARIEL. 24 (1): 133–145.
  5. ^ a b c d e f g "Fred D'Aguiar". British Council Writers Profiles. British Council. Archived from the original on 23 January 2013. Retrieved 6 June 2012.
  6. ^ Romanchuk-Kapralau, Marina (22 April 2015). "English department hires two new creative writing professors". Daily Bruin.
  7. ^ Somerville, Ewan (5 June 2010). "Jackie Kay: Interview". The Telegraph. Retrieved 4 February 2023.
  8. ^ a b "Poetry Foundation website (Fred D'Aguiar biography page)". Archived from the original on 28 February 2024. Retrieved 13 September 2024.
  9. ^ O'Brien, Sean (1996). "A Necessary Gospel". London Review of Books. 11 (6): 24–5. Retrieved 9 June 2012.
  10. ^ Salkey, Andrew (1994). "British Subjects by Fred D'Aguiar". World Literature Today. 68 (4): 864–5. doi:10.2307/40150782. JSTOR 40150782.
  11. ^ 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.
  12. ^ 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.
  13. ^ Bainbridge, Charles (19 September 2009). "Continental Shelf by Fred D'Aguiar". The Guardian (Review Section). p. 19. Retrieved 10 June 2012.
  14. ^ Flood, Alison (22 October 2009). "T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlists Poets 'Who Have Dreamed and Who Have Dared'". The Guardian. Retrieved 2 June 2012.
  15. ^ a b Edemariam, Aida (18 January 2003). "A Child Out of Time". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 June 2012.
  16. ^ 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.
  17. ^ Gurnah, Abdulrazak (15 July 1994). "Resisting Ignorance". Times Literary Supplement. p. 22.
  18. ^ King, Bruce (1997). "Dear Future by Fred D'Aguiar". World Literature Today. 71 (1): 206. doi:10.2307/40152753. JSTOR 40152753.
  19. ^ Hathaway, Heather (1998). "Dear Future by Fred D'Aguiar". African American Review. 32 (3): 506–8. doi:10.2307/3042256. JSTOR 3042256.
  20. ^ a b 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.
  21. ^ Jays, David (5 January 2003). "You can take the boy out of Guyana..." The Observer. Retrieved 9 June 2012.
  22. ^ Scheeres, Julia (7 March 2014). "Devil's Deeds". The New York Times.
  23. ^ "Mr Reasonable by Fred D'Aguiar", BBC Radio 4.
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