David Dabydeen is the author of several novels, collections of poetry and works of non-fiction.
His debut collection of poetry, Slave Song won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Cambridge Quiller-Couch Prize. His seven novels include, The Intended (winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature and shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize); Disappearance; The Counting House (shortlisted for the Impac Dublin Literary Award); A Harlot’s Progress (shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize); Our Lady of Demerara (winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature); Molly and the Muslim Stick; and Johnson’s Dictionary. He has also co-edited The Oxford Companion to Black British History.
A new novel, Sweet Li Jie was published in 2024.
There are four scholarly monographs on David’s work, and in 2011 he was the co-subject of MUP’s Contemporary World Writers Series (Abigail Ward’s Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen and Fred D’Aguiar: Representations of Slavery).
David was Guyana’s Ambassador to UNESCO from 1997 to 2010 and Guyana’s Ambassador to China from 2010 to 2015. He also worked at the University of Warwick from 1984 to 2017 as Director of the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies and Professor of Postcolonial Literature.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge and is the recipient of the 2004 Raja Rao Award for Literature, the 2007 Hind Ratten Award, and the 2008 Anthony Sabga Prize for Literature.
