Fred D’Aguiar is a British-Guyanese poet, novelist, and playwright. He trained as a psychiatric nurse before reading African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent. His first collections of poetry, Mama Dot (1985) and Airy Hall (1989), won the Guyana Poetry Prize in 1989. For these and later collections, including British Subjects (1993), the verse novel Bloodlines (2000) and Continental Shelf (2009), he was awarded the 2019 Cholmondeley Award for outstanding contributions to poetry. His first novel, The Longest Memory (1994), won the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award.
Subsequent novels include Dear Future (1996), Feeding the Ghosts (1997) and Children of Paradise (2014). His plays include High Life (1987), first produced at the Albany Empire, London, and A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death (1991), performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London. His account of a year living with cancer, Covid-19 and the struggle to assert that Black Lives Matter was published as Year of Plagues (2021). He is currently Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.
