Arboretum for the Hunted

Fred d'Aguiar is a British-Guyanese poet, novelist, and playwright. Born in London, in 1960 to Guyanese parents, he was taken in 1962 to Guyana where he lived with his grandmother until 1972, when he returned to England. D’Aguiar trained as a psychiatric nurse before reading African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury, graduating in 1985. He held writer-in-residency positions at Birmingham University and the University of Cambridge, where he was the Judith E. Wilson Fellow from 1989 to 1990. In 1994, D’Aguiar moved to the United States to take up a Visiting Writer position at Amherst College, Massachusetts, after which he taught at a number of academic institutions including Bates College, Lewiston, the University of Miami, and Virginia Tech, before becoming Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at UCLA, a post which he held until 2019. D'Aguiar has twice been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the first time in 1998 for his long narrative poem Bill of Rights, and again in 2009 for his collection Continental Shelf.