Winners at a glance
The response to part one in this series of articles on The Guyana Prize was overwhelming and encouraging; some of the criticism I am not in a position to handle but the commendations for what The Prize has achieved thus far outweighs the niggling negatives. Here I am yielding to a […]

Reviewed by M. Stephanie Browne
James C. Richmond was born and raised in Hopetown Village on the West Coast of Berbice in Guyana, South America. His writings are influenced primarily by his love of Guyana and the Caribbean region where he lived and worked. He has published three books of poetry, ‘Reflections of Today’ and […]

(Note: Where no publishing details are given [publisher, date], books mentioned in the text were published by Peepal Tree Press. Details are given in the catalogue that follows this introduction. This is a guide to Peepal Tree’s Guyanese publications, and though other books are mentioned, this introduction makes no attempt to present a general […]

The Telegraph, Calcutta: David Dabydeen is nonchalant when asked about his surname. “We know nothing about our name. It’s an empty space,” says the Guyanese writer of Indian descent. He has done his share of delving into family history and discovered that his grandfather left Calcutta in 1855 as an indentured labourer in the […]

From 1838 until 1917, Indians arrived to work as indentured labourers in Guyana. The majority never returned to India and today over 50% of the Guyanese population is of Indian origin.
This anthology of prose and poetry shows how the Indians changed the character of Guyana and the Caribbean and how, over 150 years of […]

Joel Benjamin was the Deputy Librarian and Archivist at the University of Guyana. Before he died at the tragically early age of 45 in 1989, he contributed immensely to the collating and preserving of material and information vital to Guyana’s historical and cultural knowledge. His articles, on little known Guyanese literature and 19th century […]

Judaman Seecoomar was born on the Lusignan Plantation, Demerera County Guyana in 1932. Despite his stepfathers’ refusal to allow him to continue with his education beyond the age of 12, he studied independently and eventually qualified as a teacher He believed passionately in raising the aspirations of his students and challenging the culture of […]

Cyril Dabydeen was born in the Canje, Guyana, in 1945, a locality which also produced his contemporaries Arnold Itwaru and Jan Shinebourne. His family were too poor to permit him to attend high school. His father was a marginal cattle farmer, his mother a seamstress. He grew up with his grandmother and an extended […]

Rupert Roopnaraine was born in 1943 in Kitty, Georgetown, Guyana. He won a scholarship to Queen’s College in 1954 where he excelled in cricket, where he captained the team and represented Demerara in the Inter-county Cricket Finals. In 1962 he was awarded a Guyana scholarship to attend the University of Cambridge where he studied […]

Sasenarine Persaud is the author of six poetry collections, Demerary Telepathy(Peepal Tree, 1989), Between the Dash and the Comma (author, 1989) and The Wintering Kundalini (Peepal Tree). In Canada he has published A Surf of Sparrows’ Songs (1996), The Hungry Sailor and A Writer Like You, a collection of short stories, Canada Geese […]