David Dabydeen

David Horace Clarence Harilal Sookram

An award-winning poet and novelist, David Dabydeen worked at the University of Warwick's Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies for many years. He has previously served as Guyana's Ambassador and Permanent Delegate to UNESCO and as Ambassador to China.

Born on a sugar estate in Berbice, Guyana, Dabydeen lived for a time with family in New Amsterdam, where he attended school. After winning a scholarship to Queen’s College in Georgetown, he went to England in 1969 and was in care until he was sixteen. He won a scholarship to Cambridge University and studied English there and at London universities, completing his doctorate in 1982. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford University for three years and also worked as a community education officer in Wolverhampton.

His first poetry collection, Slave Song, published by Dangaroo in 1984, won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. The collection reimagines life on the sugar plantations in Guyana, exploring the connections between slavery and indentureship, violence and desire, and is notable for the author's lyrical use of Creole linguistic forms. Coolie Odyssey (published in 1988) is an exploration of the experience of diaspora, connecting peasant labourers from India to both the plantations of the Caribbean and the streets of Britain. Turner: New and Selected Poems (1994) returns to the subject of enslavement and imperial legacies, and offers a literary recuperation of the drowning figure in J. M. W. Turner’s painting Slave Ship.

Dabydeen’s eight novels, diverse in scope and focus, are nevertheless typified by imaginative, allusive depth. They are underwritten by a concern for the plight of all those marginalized by the violence of empire and its dispossessing legacies. The Intended (1991) draws on memories of a childhood in Guyana and of migrant struggles in London. Disappearance (1993) tells the tale of a Guyanese engineer working on a cliff reclamation project in rural Kent: a ‘condition of England’ novel that uncovers the imperial pathology at the heart of the nation. The Counting House (1996) is a historical fiction of indenture, connecting India and British Guiana via the corruptions of finance on the sugar plantation. A Harlot’s Progress (1999) returns readers to the eighteenth-century city of London and the Black presence, foregrounding the figure of the slave boy from Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress. Our Lady of Demerara (2004) weaves together the landscapes of Guyana and the English West Midlands in an irrealist meditation on sexual power and exploitation, environmental vulnerability and divine forgiveness. Molly and the Muslim Stick (2008) is a redemptive, absurdist parable that views the disjunctures of twentieth-century history through the fractured psyche of its visionary protagonist. Johnson’s Dictionary (2013) again connects eighteenth-century London with the plantations of Demerara and centres the agency of the enslaved as tricksters, rebels, narrators and scientists capable of overturning the hierarchies of capitalist imperialism and challenging the bonds of history. 2024’s Sweet Li Jie offers a vision of Chinese experiences of empire and indenture, linking, through the narrative of personal intimacies, the world of feudal Wuhan to the cane-fields of Guyana.

Dabydeen has also produced several significant works of scholarship on the subject of the Black presence in British history and art, and on teaching Caribbean and Black British and Asian literature. He has broadcast across numerous media platforms including BBC Radio 4 and BBC television.