Fred D’Aguiar was born in London in 1960 to Guyanese parents and grew up in Guyana, returning to England when he was a teenager. His previous collections include Airy Hall (1989, winner of the Guyana Poetry Prize) and Bill of Rights (1998, shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize). He is also the author of four novels, the first of which, The Longest Memory (1994), won both the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. Continental Shelf (2009) was also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and was the Poetry Book Society Summer Choice. A sequence of poems in this book was written after the shootings at Virginia Tech State University, where Fred was Professor of English and Gloria D Smith Professor of Africana Studies at the time. Since Continental Shelf, Fred has published further collections, including For the Unnamed (2023) and Letters to America, a Poetry Book Society Winter Choice in 2020; and the non-fiction book, Year of Plagues (2021). In 2019, he was awarded a Cholmondeley Award for outstanding contributions to poetry.
