The Guyana Quartet: 'Genius' (Jamaica Kincaid)

Sir Wilson Harris was a prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist, and lecturer. Born in 1921 in British Guiana, his father died when he was two and his stepfather disappeared into the rainforests in 1929. He began working as a government surveyor in 1942 and led expeditions into the Amazonian interior for almost 15 years. In 1959 he left for England to become a full-time writer. The following year, Faber published his debut novel, Palace of the Peacock , which became a landmark of Caribbean literature and the first of The Guyana Quartet. Over the course of his career, Faber published all 26 of Harris' novels, including The Carnival Trilogy, Jonestown, The Mask of the Beggar, and The Ghost of Memory. Harris was awarded numerous academic fellowships and honorary doctorates as well as being a Guggenheim Fellow. He twice won the Guyana Prize for Literature as well as a Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. Harris was knighted in 2010, and died in 2018 at the age of 96.

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of two acclaimed poetry collections: Far District and House of Lords and Commons. He is the recipient of the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, among other awards. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University.