Fred D’Aguiar was born in London to Guyanese parents and raised in Guyana; he moved to England when he was 12 and trained as a psychiatric nurse before earning a degree in African and Caribbean studies at the University of Kent. He is the author of numerous poetry collections, plays, and novels. In his work across many genres, D’Aguiar investigates the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and diaspora.

His books of poetry include Mama Dot (1985); Airy Hall (1989), winner of a Guyana Poetry Prize; British Subjects (1993); Bill of Rights (1998), shortlisted for a T.S. Eliot Prize; An English Sampler: New and Selected Poems (2001); Continental Shelf (2009); and The Rose of Toulouse (2013). He is the author of the plays High Life (1987) and A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death (1991), originally performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London. D’Aguiar is also an accomplished novelist: his first novel, The Longest Memory (1994), won a David Higham Prize for Fiction and a Whitbread First Novel Award. Other novels include Dear Future (1996), Feeding the Ghosts (1997), and Children of Paradise (2014), a fictional account of the 1978 Jonestown massacre in Guyana.

Speaking to Rain Taxi about the relationships between history and literature, public and private, that he so often engages in his work, D’Aguiar isolates poetry as an important tool in rendering the complexities of fact and fiction: “I began as a poet so I’m always thinking, ‘Corrupt the narrative, circle, go downwards, don’t go forwards too much!’” he tells Alexander Dickow. “Because I do think that’s how the truths are, they’re soundings. [Seamus] Heaney called it soundings when you throw out something as surveyors do and it goes, waiting, and surprised by the long wait and so thinking, oh my goodness, that thrown thing has not landed as yet, nothing’s come back, can’t be! You’re on psychological terrain in that gesture of the flung thing that never lands on solid ground, that keeps going, that’s the kind of depth the novel plumbs.”

D’Aguiar has twice won the Phi Beta Kappa Sturm Award for Excellence in Creative Arts. A former Judith E. Wilson fellow at Cambridge University, he has taught at Amherst College, Bates College, the University of Miami, and Virginia Tech, where he was named Clifford A. Cutchins III Professor of English in 2015.