Fred D'Aguiar's new collection connects the condition of namelessness of a famous black jockey with a present-day need to give back to those lost souls the dignity of their names.
Fred D. Aguiar Book order
Fred D'Aguiar is an acclaimed poet, novelist, and playwright whose work delves into the complexities of identity, history, and social justice. His writing, shaped by his Guyanese heritage and experiences living between Guyana, London, and the United States, explores the intricate legacies of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. Through vivid narratives and powerful verse, D'Aguiar confronts uncomfortable truths about the past and present. His literary voice offers profound insights into the human condition, transcending geographical and cultural divides.






- 2023
- 2021
Year of Plagues
- 336 pages
- 12 hours of reading
In this piercing and unforgettable memoir, the award-winning poet reflects on a year of turbulence, fear, and hope.
- 2020
The fourth Carcanet collection from Guyanese-British poet Fred D'Aguiar.
- 2018
Translations from Memory
- 112 pages
- 4 hours of reading
Guyanese-British poet Fred D'Aguiar's poetry has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. His new book wonderfully recreates moments of his and our wider history, making inclusions where exclusions have occurred before.
- 2014
Acclaimed novelist, playwright, and poet Fred D’Aguiar has been short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize in poetry for Bill of Rights, his narrative poem about the Jonestown massacre, and won the Whitbread First Novel Award for The Longest Memory. In this beautifully imagined work of literary fiction, he returns to the territory of Jim Jones’s utopian commune, interweaving magical realism and shocking history into a resonant story of love, faith, oppression, and sacrifice in which a mother and daughter attempt to break free with the help of an extraordinary gorilla. Joyce and her young daughter, Trina, are members of a utopian community ruled by a magnetic preacher. When Trina, plays too near to the cage holding the commune’s gorilla, Adam, the ape attacks and kills the child. Or so everyone believes. That night, the preacher dramatically “revives” her—an act that transforms Trina into a symbol of its charismatic leader’s God-like power. Desperate to save her daughter from the preacher’s control, the outspoken Joyce attempts a daring escape, a run for freedom aided by another prisoner—the remarkable Adam. Told with a sweeping perspective in lush prose, shimmering with magic, and devastating in its clarity, Children of Paradise is a brilliant and evocative exploration of oppression—of both mind and body—and of the liberating power of storytelling.
- 2014
Feeding the Ghosts
- 240 pages
- 9 hours of reading
Powerful and poetic, Feeding the Ghosts is an unforgettable testimony to the struggle against oblivion, and a reminder of history overlooked and truth distorted
- 2013
The Rose of Toulouse
- 80 pages
- 3 hours of reading
The Rose of Toulouse is a book of geographies tracing where the poet has lived and taught, their histories, and his history as he travels away from who he was.
- 2009
Continental Shelf
- 131 pages
- 5 hours of reading
Traces a journey, across continents and from youth to maturity. This book moves from memories of childhood in Guyana, through a long elegiac exploration of the shootings at Virginia Tech University in 2006, to the reflective closing section. It celebrates how imagination and memory enable us to cope with violence and death.
- 1996
The youngest child of a Guyanese family is accidently hit on the head with an axe, and sees the world through a strange visionary perspective. While the family plays and squabbles, an election is brewing in the capital which leads to an unexpected act of violence that destroys the family's world.
