The POC network presents a series of articles highlighting Black British Icons from the past and present.
Fred D'Aguiar
Writer Fred D’Aguiar was born in London in 1960 but moved to Guyana when he was nearly two years old. At the age of twelve, he moved back to England to continue his studies in 1972.
D'Aguiar trained and worked as a psychiatric but also attended the University of Kent where he took courses in African and Caribbean studies. After graduating, D’Aguiar published his first poetry book, Mama Dot. This, along with his second poetry collection Airy Hall, won the Guyana Poetry Prize.D’Aguiar’s third poetry collection, British Subjects (1993) is set in England and explores the experiences of West Indian’s in London. In the poem A Gift of a Rose, he experiences racism where is beaten up by the police:
Two policemen (I remember there were at least two)
stopped me and gave me a bunch of red, red roses.
…
I argued I was simply flashed down and the roses
liberally spread over my face and body to epithets
sworn by the police in praise of my black skin and mother.
D’Aguiar’s poem, Sweet Thames, won the Commission for Racial Equality Race in the Media Award.
His first novel, The Longest Memory, is set in a Virginia slave plantation and won both the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. The novel revolves around a slave who is tragically whipped to death for running away and explores the inhumane treatment of slaves and themes of racial inferiority and injustice.
D’Aguiar has taught in the United States including Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Miami, Professor of English at Virginia Tech State University, and Professor of English at UCLA.
In 2019 D’Aguiar received the Cholmondeley Award for his contributions to poetry.