Fred D'Aguiar is a British poet, novelist, and playwright. Born in London to Guyanese parents, D'Aguiar spent the first twelve years of his life in Guyana, where he lived with his grandmother until returning to England in 1972.
Having trained as a psychiatric nurse before studying African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent, D'Aguiar published his first poetry collection Mama Dot in 1985. D'Aguiar published two more volumes of poetry before his 1994 novel The Longest Memory, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award and the David Higham Prize for Fiction.
D'Aguiar continued to write plays, poetry, and novels while working as a visiting writer and English professor at universities in Britain and the United States. In 2019 he was awarded the Cholmondeley Award for outstanding contributions to poetry. His most recent teaching appointment was as Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Guyanese-British author Fred D'Aguiar's 1994 novel The Longest Memory is about Whitechapel, an elderly slave whose mixed-race son is whipped to death after he tries to escape a Virginia plantation to live in the North with the slave master's white...
