Fred DAguiar was born in London in 1960 to Guyanese parents and grew up in Guyana, returning to England when he was a teenager. He trained as a psychiatric nurse before reading African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury. His previous collections of poetry are Mama Dot (1985), Airy Hall (1989; winner of the Guyana Poetry Prize), British Subjects (1993) and Bill of Rights (1998; shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize), all published by Chatto. His An English Sampler: New and Selected Poems appeared in 2001. Fred DAguiar is also the author of four novels, the first of which, The Longest Memory (Pantheon, 1994), won both the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. His plays include High Life (1987) and A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death (1991), which was performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London.
