Wilson Harris

Theodore Wilson Harris was born on the twenty-fourth of March 1921 at New Amsterdam in the Berbice region of British Guiana, the son of Theodore Wilson Harris Sr. — a manager of insurance and small commercial interests of mixed African, Amerindian and European descent — and Millicent Glasford Harris. His father died when he was two. He was raised in straitened circumstances by his mother and stepfather at Berbice. He attended Queen's College in Georgetown from 1934 to 1939 and took on graduation a position with the Government of British Guiana Land and Surveys Department.

He served as a land surveyor for the colonial Land and Surveys Department for the following twenty years — supervising the survey work that took him repeatedly into the interior rivers of Guyana, the Pakaraima mountains, the Kaieteur Falls country and the Rupununi savannahs along the Brazilian border. The interior survey work was the formative material of his subsequent fiction.

He published verse from 1951 in the Kyk-Over-Al journal of the British Guianese national-literary movement edited by A. J. Seymour. He emigrated to London in 1959 at thirty-eight and completed in the following year his first novel Palace of the Peacock. The novel — describing the journey of an interior-trading expedition up an unnamed Guianese river toward the place from which they had all previously not returned — established him as the principal mystic-modernist voice of post-war Anglo-Caribbean letters.

He produced across the following five decades twenty-six further novels — including the three subsequent volumes of the Guyana Quartet (The Far Journey of Oudin of 1961, The Whole Armour of 1962, The Secret Ladder of 1963), the Carnival Trilogy of 1985 to 1990, and the late masterpiece The Mask of the Beggar of 2003 — that constitute the principal continuous prose project of late-twentieth-century Caribbean literature. The Harris fiction was the principal stylistic counterweight to the social-realist mainstream of the contemporary Caribbean novel.

He held an honorary D.Litt. from the University of the West Indies and was awarded a knighthood by Elizabeth II in 2010.

He died at Chelmsford, Essex, on the eighth of March 2018, at ninety-six.

He is honored here as the mystic-modernist of Caribbean letters.