The Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport is delighted to congratulate Guyanese writer and Man of Letters Wilson Harris on being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II as part of her 2010 Birthday Honours Awards.
In a press release yesterday the ministry said the knighthood symbolizes the highest service or accomplishment in a chosen field. It said it therefore joins Guyanese born Professor David Dabydeen in noting the honour as “a great moment in Guyanese literary history.”
After being inspired by the hinterland, “the cathedral of Forests” during his work as a surveyor, “Harris painted cerebral but vivid word pictures of the rain forest landscape in his poetry and later novels.”
A Berbician Queen’s College graduate, he migrated to the UK to hone his unique literary skills; producing seminal works such as Palace of the Peacock, The Far Journey of Qudin and the Secret Ladder among his early 30 publications. Harris has also won the Guyana Prize two times.
Like his contemporaries Edgar Mittelholzer, Jan Carew and E R Braithwaite Harris’s exile to the UK never dulled his affinity for his homeland. “We celebrate this international recognition of a Guyanese literary genius whose advanced maturity has done nothing to his creativity except to fuel his wonderful imagination to keep lecturing and inspiring others,” the ministry said.
