Indo-Guyanese or Indian-Guyanese, are people of Indian origin who are Guyanese nationals tracing their ancestry to India and the wider subcontinent. They are the descendants of indentured servants and settlers who migrated from India beginning in 1838, and continuing during the time of the British Raj.
Guyanese literature covers works including novels, poetry, plays and others written by people born or strongly-affiliated with Guyana. Formerly British Guiana, British language and style has an enduring impact on the writings from Guyana, which are done in English language and utilizing Guyanese Creole. Emigration has contributed to a large body of work relating the Guyanese diaspora experience.
Roy Aubrey Kelvin Heath was a Guyanese writer who settled in the UK, where he lived for five decades, working as a schoolteacher as well as writing. His 1978 novel The Murderer won the Guardian Fiction Prize. He went on to become more noted for his "Georgetown Trilogy" of novels, consisting of From the Heat of the Day (1979), One Generation (1980), and Genetha (1981), which were also published in an omnibus volume as The Armstrong Trilogy, 1994. Heath said that his writing was "intended to be a dramatic chronicle of twentieth-century Guyana". His work has been described as "marked by comprehensive social observation, penetrating psychological analysis, and vigorous, picaresque action."
Pauline Melville FRSL is an English-Guyanese born writer and former actor of mixed European and Amerindian ancestry, who is currently based in London, England. Among awards she has received for her writing – which encompasses short stories, novels and essays – are the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award, and the Guyana Prize for Literature. Salman Rushdie has said: "I believe her to be one of the few genuinely original writers to emerge in recent years."
David Dabydeen is a Guyanese-born broadcaster, novelist, poet and academic. He was formerly Guyana's Ambassador to UNESCO from 1997 to 2010 and the youngest Member of the UNESCO Executive Board (1993–1997), elected by the General Council of all Member States of UNESCO. He was appointed Guyana's Ambassador Plenipotentiary and Extraordinaire to China, from 2010 to 2015. He is one of the longest serving diplomats in the history of Guyana, most of his work done in a voluntary unpaid capacity.
Lakshmi Persaud is a Trinidad-born, British-based writer who resides in London, England. She is the author of five novels: Butterfly in the Wind (1990), Sastra (1993), For the Love of My Name (2000), Raise the Lanterns High (2004) and Daughters of Empire (2012).
Grace Nichols FRSL is a Guyanese poet who moved to Britain in 1977, before which she worked as a teacher and journalist in Guyana. Her first collection, I is a Long-Memoried Woman (1983), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. In December 2021, she was announced as winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.
Peter "Lauchmonen" Kempadoo was a writer and broadcaster from Guyana. He also worked as a development worker in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. He moved in 1953 to the UK, where he built a career in print journalism as well as radio and television broadcasting, and published two novels, Guiana Boy in 1960 — the first novel by a Guyanese of Indian descent — and Old Thom's Harvest in 1965, before returning to Guyana in 1970. He died in London, aged 92.
Mahadai Das was a Guyanese poet. She was born in Eccles, East Bank Demerara, Guyana, in 1954. She wrote poetry from her early school days at The Bishops' High School, Georgetown. She did her first degree at the University of Guyana and received her B.A. in philosophy at Columbia University, New York, and then began a doctoral programme in Philosophy at the University of Chicago. Das became very ill and was never able to complete the programme.
Ryhaan Shah is an Indo-Guyanese writer born in Berbice, Guyana. She is active in Guyanese public life as the President of the Guyanese Indian Heritage Association (GIHA).
Citizens or residents of the United Kingdom whose origins lie in Guyana are a part of the country's British Caribbean community. Guyana was a former British colony, British Guiana, responsible for moving large numbers of Africans and Indians for labor in the sugar industry. British Guyanese are notable for their contributions to literature and music.
Alison Donnell is an academic, originally from the United Kingdom. She is Professor of Modern Literatures and Head of the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She was previously Head of School of Literature and Languages at the University of Reading, where she also founded the research theme "Minority Identities: Rights and Representations". Her primary research field is anglophone postcolonial literature, and she has been published widely on Caribbean and Black British literature. Much of her academic work also focuses questions relating to gender and sexual identities and the intersections between feminism and postcolonialism.
Women in Guyana are a cross-section of Guyanese society whose numbers have fluctuated with time. A country with primarily Indo-Guyanese, Afro-Guyanese and Amerindian women, Guyana has also been home to women of European or Chinese descent. The country has had a female president, Janet Jagan. Although it is part of South America, Guyana is culturally and historically aligned with the Commonwealth Caribbean and is often compared to Trinidad and Tobago.
Stephanos Stephanides is a Cypriot-born author, poet, translator, critic, ethnographer, and documentary film maker. In 1957 he moved with his father to the United Kingdom and since then he has lived in several countries for more than 34 years. He returned to Cyprus in 1991 as part of the founding faculty of the University of Cyprus where he holds the position of Professor of English and Comparative Literature. Stephanides’ dominant and literary language is English, and he is also fluent in Greek, Spanish and Portuguese. His early migration from Cyprus to the United Kingdom and subsequent work and travel in many countries has been influential in shaping the transcultural character of his work. As a young lecturer at the university of Guyana, he became deeply interested in Caribbean literary and cultural expression and his anthropological work with the descendant of Indian indentured labourers in Guyanese villages and sugar plantations marked the beginning of a lifelong interest in Indian culture and the Indian diaspora, his creative and academic writing span issues of cross-culturality, dislocation and migration. Hail Mother Kali deals with issues of a broken postcolonial society of racially mixed Indian and African descendants in Guyana.
The Swinging Bridge is a novel by Ramabai Espinet, published in 2003 by HarperCollins Publishing. In 2004, the novel was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in the category of Best First Book. Espinet's novel focuses on a multi-generational Indo-Trinidadian family living in Canada, touching on a number of themes and topics such as gender identity and matrilineal ties.
Angus Percy Bain Richmond was a Guyanese writer who spent most of his life in Britain.
Meiling Jin is a Guyanese author, radio broadcaster, playwright, and filmmaker who currently lives in London, England.
Jane Phillips-Gay, CCH was an Afro-Guyanese trade unionist and an ordained minister. She was an advocate of women's rights, formed one of the first women's political organizations in the country and served as one of the first women to be elected as a Member of British Guiana Parliament. She was recognized with the national service honor, the Cacique Crown of Honor in 1975.
Joan Cambridge, also known as Joan Cambridge Mayfield, is a Guyanese writer.
Shana Yardan was a Guyanese poet and broadcaster, whose work contributed to wider understanding of experiences of Guyanese women, the impact of British colonialism and the natural world.
