An event of readings by award-winning poet and playwright Fred D'Aguiar and an in-conversation with Dr Jason Allen-Paisant, hosted by The Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies (ICPS) and Renaissance One.

For D’Aguiar 2020 was a year of personal and global crisis. The world around him was shattered by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the United States, California burned, and he was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.

Year of Plagues is an intimate, multifaceted exploration of these seismic events, which trouble and alienate D’Aguiar from community, place and body. Combining personal reminiscence and philosophy, and drawing on music and on poetry, he confronts profound questions about pursuing a life in the face of overwhelming upheavals.

Within the book, the author shows through poetry his influences and passions, with references to Phyllis Wheatley, Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, Martin Carter, Kamau Brathwaite and Wilson Harris.

Drawn from distinct cultural perspectives—his Caribbean upbringing, London youth and American lifestyle—D’Aguiar’s beautiful and challenging memoir is a challenging yet uplifting lyrical memoir of existence, protest, and survival.

“Fred D'Aguiar comes to seem like Derek Walcott's true twenty-first-century heir... Fred D'Aguiar has written 'a canticle of water', a book for the individual bowed, imperilled, under the wave of history –monarchical and imperial - and crying out for collective action to stop it from consuming further shores.” Camille Ralphs, Ambit

About The Author: Poet, novelist and playwright, Fred D’Aguiar was born in London to Guyanese parents. He grew up in Guyana, returning to England in his teens. He trained as a psychiatric nurse before reading English with African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He is the author of five novels, including Children of Paradise, about Jonestown, Guyana, and The Longest Memory, which won both the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. His eighth poetry book, Letters to America in 2020 was a Poetry Book Society Choice. His numerous plays have been staged in the UK and broadcast on BBC radio. He has lived in the US since the 1990s and he is currently Professor of English at University of California Los Angeles.