Fred D'Aguiar is a poet, novelist, and playwright, born in Guyana where he spent his childhood before moving to the UK in his teens. He is currently based in LA where he is a professor of English and Creative Writing at UCLA.
He is the author of four novels, including The Longest Memory, which won the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. His poetry has garnered multiple awards and has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
His latest book is the memoir Year of Plagues: a Memoir of 2020 (Carcanet, 2021). The plagues referred to in the title include the Covid-19 pandemic, the author’s own battle with cancer, and the social unrest brought about by the public lynchings of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery and the murder of Breonna Taylor in the US, and the subsequent growth of the Black Lives Matter movement. Despite the pain and hardships of D’Aguiar’s subject matter, Year of Plagues is a musical, poetic, often humorous mixture of autobiography and meditations on society and literature.