Recognition for a novelist and scholar

David Dabydeen’s latest work has just been released.  It is a new novel, Molly and the Muslim Stick (2008) published in London by Macmillan, and the celebration of its appearance coincides with the acclaim which accompanied the most recent international honour bestowed upon him last weekend. 

Dabydeen is among the topmost flight of Guyanese and West Indian novelists; he is one of the foremost fiction writers, poets, critics and academics in the UK where he is Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.  He was presented with his most recent honour in Port of Spain, Trinidad (April 2008), the Anthony N Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence in Arts and Letters.  As it happens, another Guyanese was also a winner in another field; Anette Arjoon was co-winner of the Award for Excellence for outstanding Public and Civic Contribution.

Another significant note is that Dabydeen is extremely highly decorated as a writer.  The Anthony N Sabga Award was actually his second for 2008, having, a little more than two months ago, gone to India to receive the Hind Rattan (Jewel of India) Award presented by the Government of India.  What is more, that was also his second recent Indian recognition, having been the winner of the 2004 Raja Rao Award, given in India for outstanding contribution to literature in the Indian diaspora.

He won the Guyana Prize for Literature on three occasions, as the writer of the Best Book of Fiction, The Intended, in 1992.  He repeated that achievement in 2000 with The Harlot’s Progress and again in 2004 with Our Lady of Demerara. Among his British prizes is the Greater London Council Literature Prize, 1985, while he was shortlisted for two of the most prestigious in that country – the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, which is the oldest literary award in the UK, and the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1992.