Wilson Harris

Wilson Harris (1921 - 2018) was a prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist and lecturer. Born in 1921 in British Guiana, his father died when he was two and his stepfather later disappeared into the rainforest. Harris began working as a government surveyor in 1942 and led expeditions into the Amazonian interior for almost fifteen years. In 1959 he movedto London to become a full-time writer. The following year, Faber published his debut novel, Palace of the Peacock, which became a landmark of modern literature and the first of The Guyana Quartet, which is reissued in November 2021 with a new foreword by Jamaica Kincaid and celebrated by Monique Roffey, Jeet Thayil and Angela Carter. Over his celebrated career, Harris wrote twenty-six novels including The Carnival Trilogy, Jonestown, The Mask of the Beggar and The Ghost of Memory. He was awarded numerous academic fellowships and honorary doctorates, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as twice winning the Guyana Prize for Literature and a Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. Harris was knighted in 2010 and died in 2018 at the age of ninety-six.