An evening with Fred D'Aguiar and Shivanee Ramlochan

Fred D'Aguiar spent his childhood in London and Guyana and is currently based in LA where he teaches English and Creative Writing at UCLA. He is the author of four novels, including The Longest Memory, which won the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award and his poetry has garnered awards including being shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. His latest book is the memoir Year of Plagues: a Memoir of 2020 (Carcanet, 2021). The plagues referred to in the title include the Covid19 pandemic, the author’s own battle with cancer and the social unrest brought about by the public lynchings of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery and murder of Breonna Taylor in the States, and the subsequent growth of the Black Lives Matter movement. Despite the pain and hardships of D’Aguiar’s subject matter, Year of Plagues is a musical, poetic, often humorous mixture of autobiography and meditations on society and literature.

Shivanee Ramlochan is a Trinidadian writer and critic. Her debut book of poems, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (Peepal Tree Press, 2017), was shortlisted for the 2018 Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was a finalist for the People's Choice T&T Book of the Year. “The Red Thread Cycle”, the central suite of seven poems from her debut book, won a Small Axe Literary Competition Prize for Poetry and was on audio visual display at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas. She has served as a poetry reader and judge for Commonwealth Writers, Honeysuckle Press, Moko Magazine, Forward Prizes and others. Her second book, Unkillable, essays on Indo-Caribbean women’s disobedience, is forthcoming from Noemi Press in 2023.

Dr. Emily Zobel Marshall's has been a full-time Lecturer at the School of Cultural Studies since 2007. She is also a PhD supervisor to several students within the school. She has a great deal of experience in supervising undergraduate students writing dissertations on migrant and postcolonial literatures and welcomes research students interested in many areas of contemporary literature, especially topics related to African, Caribbean, African-American and Black British literatures and cultures, postcolonial theory and interdisciplinary approaches to postcolonial writing.

Emily's research specialisms are Caribbean literature and Caribbean carnival cultures. She is an expert on the trickster figure in the folklore, oral cultures and literature of the African Diaspora and has published widely in these fields. She has also established a Caribbean Carnival Cultures research platform and network that aims to bring the critical, creative, academic and artistic aspects of carnival into dialogue with one another. Emily regularly hosts and chairs literary events and has organised international conferences on the literature and cultures of the African diaspora. She is a regular contributor to BBC radio discussions on racial politics and Caribbean culture. Her books focus on the role of the trickster in Caribbean and African American cultures; her first book, Anansi’s Journey: A Story of Jamaican Cultural Resistance (2012) was published by the University of the West Indies Press and her second book, American Trickster: Trauma Tradition and Brer Rabbit, was published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2019. Emily is also a published poet.