Wilson Harris

Theodore Wilson Harris was born on 24 March 1921 in New Amsterdam, British Guiana, of Amerindian, African and English descent. His father, who worked at an insurance company, died, and his mother remarried. He attended Queen's College in Georgetown from 1934 to 1939, and in 1942 became a government surveyor, work that took him on many expeditions into the Guyanese interior.

His years mapping the rivers, savannas and rainforests gave him a vision of the land that shaped everything he wrote. He began as a poet, publishing Fetish in 1951 and Eternity to Season in 1954, and married Cecily Carew, sister of the novelist Jan Carew, in 1945. By 1955 he had become a senior surveyor. In 1959 he moved to England, finding it, he said, impossible to stay in Guyana and write.

His first novel, Palace of the Peacock, was published by Faber in 1960. A dream-like journey up a Guyanese river by a crew of different peoples, led by a cruel colonial named Donne, it was the first of the four novels of the Guyana Quartet, followed by The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962) and The Secret Ladder (1963). Heartland (1964) is regarded as a sequel.

Over the following decades Harris wrote many more novels and essays, among them a trio set in London, Da Silva da Silva's Cultivated Wilderness (1977), The Tree of the Sun (1978) and The Angel at the Gate (1982), and the Carnival trilogy of Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987) and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990). He later published Jonestown (1996) and The Dark Jester (2001). His books drew on the landscape and the many peoples of Guyana, and were famous for their difficulty and imaginative range.

In 2010 he was knighted for services to literature. He died on 8 March 2018 at Chelmsford, Essex, at 96, with his second wife, Margaret, and a family that included four children from his first marriage. He is regarded as one of the most original and demanding writers to emerge from the Caribbean.