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Fred D. Aguiar

    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.

    Translations from Memory
    Dear Future
    The Rose of Toulouse
    Year of Plagues
    Letters to America
    Continental Shelf
    • 2023

      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.

      For the Unnamed
    • 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.

      Year of Plagues
    • 2020
    • 2018

      Translations from Memory

      • 112 pages
      • 4 hours of reading
      3.8(11)Add rating

      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.

      Translations from Memory
    • 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.

      Children of Paradise
    • 2014

      Feeding the Ghosts

      • 240 pages
      • 9 hours of reading
      3.7(30)Add rating

      Powerful and poetic, Feeding the Ghosts is an unforgettable testimony to the struggle against oblivion, and a reminder of history overlooked and truth distorted

      Feeding the Ghosts
    • 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.

      The Rose of Toulouse
    • 2009

      Continental Shelf

      • 131 pages
      • 5 hours of reading
      4.2(13)Add rating

      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.

      Continental Shelf
    • 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.

      Dear Future