David Dabydeen is a
GuyaneseGuyana , officially the Co-operative Republic of Guyana, previously the colony of British Guiana, is a sovereign state on the northern coast of South America that is culturally part of the Anglophone Caribbean. Guyana was a former colony of the Dutch and of the British...
-born critic, writer and novelist.
Dabydeen was born in
BerbiceBerbice is a region along the Berbice River in Guyana, which was between 1627 and 1815 a colony of the Netherlands. After having been ceded to the United Kingdom in the latter year, it was merged with Essequibo and Demerara to form the colony of British Guiana in 1831...
,
GuyanaGuyana , officially the Co-operative Republic of Guyana, previously the colony of British Guiana, is a sovereign state on the northern coast of South America that is culturally part of the Anglophone Caribbean. Guyana was a former colony of the Dutch and of the British...
, his birth registered at New Amsterdam Registrar of Births as David Horace Clarence Harilal Sookram. He moved to London, England, to rejoin his father, attorney David Harilal Sookram.
He read English at
Selwyn CollegeSelwyn College is a constituent college in the University of Cambridge in England, United Kingdom.The college was founded by the Selwyn Memorial Committee in memory of the Rt Reverend George Selwyn , who rowed on the Cambridge crew in the first Varsity Boat Race in 1829, and went on to become the...
,
University of CambridgeThe University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
,
United KingdomThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
, and was awarded a
Bachelor of ArtsA Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
with honours. He then gained a Ph.D. in 18th-century literature and art at
University College LondonUniversity College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and the oldest and largest constituent college of the federal University of London...
in 1982, and was awarded a research fellowship at
Wolfson College, OxfordWolfson College is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. Located in north Oxford along the River Cherwell, Wolfson is an all-graduate college with over sixty governing body fellows, in addition to both research and junior research fellows. It caters to a wide range of...
. He is a Professor at the Centre for British Comparative Cultural Studies at the
University of WarwickThe University of Warwick is a public research university located in Coventry, United Kingdom...
in Coventry, United Kingdom. He is a member of
UNESCOThe United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...
's Executive Board. He is the author of four novels, three collections of poetry and several works of non-fiction and criticism. His first book,
Slave Song (1984), a collection of poetry, won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Quiller-Couch Prize. A further collection,
Turner: New and Selected Poems, was published in 1994, and reissued in 2002; the title-poem,
Turner is an extended sequence or
verse novelA verse novel is a type of narrative poetry in which a novel-length narrative is told through the medium of poetry rather than prose. Either simple or complex stanzaic verse-forms may be used, but there will usually be a large cast, multiple voices, dialogue, narration, description, and action in a...
responding to a painting by
J. M. W. TurnerJoseph Mallord William Turner RA was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting...
,
Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying — Typhoon coming on (1840).
His first novel,
The Intended (1991), the story of a young Asian student abandoned in London by his father, won the Guyana Prize for Literature.
Disappearance (1993) tells the story of a young Guyanese engineer working on the south coast of England who lodges with an elderly woman.
The Counting House (1996) is set at the end of the nineteenth century and narrates the experiences of an Indian couple whose hopes of a new life in colonial Guyana end in tragedy. The story explores historical tensions between indentured Indian workers and Guyanese of African descent. His most recent novel,
A Harlot's Progress (1999), is based on a series of pictures painted by
William HogarthWilliam Hogarth was an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art. His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects"...
in 1732 and develops the story of Hogarth's black slave boy. Through the character of Mungo, Dabydeen challenges traditional cultural representations of the slave.
Dabydeen has been awarded the title of fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He is the second West Indian writer (V.S. Naipaul was the first) and the only Guyanese writer to receive the title.
In 2001 Dabydeen wrote and presented
The Forgotten Colony, a
BBC Radio 4BBC Radio 4 is a British domestic radio station, operated and owned by the BBC, that broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history. It replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. The station controller is currently Gwyneth Williams, and the...
programme exploring the history of Guyana. His one-hour documentary
Painting the People was broadcast by
BBC televisionBBC Television is a service of the British Broadcasting Corporation. The corporation, which has operated in the United Kingdom under the terms of a Royal Charter since 1927, has produced television programmes from its own studios since 1932, although the start of its regular service of television...
in 2004.
David Dabydeen's latest novel,
Our Lady of Demerara, was published in 2004.
The Oxford Companion to Black British History, co-edited by Dabydeen, John Gilmore and Cecily Jones, appeared in 2007.
In 2010 Dabydeen was appointed as Guyana’s Ambassador to China.
Prizes and awards
- 1984 Commonwealth Poetry Prize - Slave Song
- 1984 Quiller-Couch Prize - Slave Song
- 1991 Guyana Prize for Literature - The Intended
- 1999 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction), shortlist - A Harlot's Progress
- 2004 Raja Rao Award for Literature (India)