Wilson Harris

Wilson Harris (born March 24, 1921, New Amsterdam, British Guiana [now Guyana]—died March 8, 2018, Chelmsford, Essex, England) was a Guyanese author noted for the broad vision and abstract complexity of his novels.

Harris attended Queen’s College in Georgetown, British Guiana (1934–39). From 1942 until 1958 he was a government surveyor, and he used his intimate knowledge of the savannas and vast, mysterious rain forests of the country’s interior to create the settings for his fiction. In 1959 he moved to London. He first wrote poetry, which is collected in Fetish (1951) and The Well and the Land (1952). He then wrote and abandoned several manuscripts before publishing The Guyana Quartet, composed of Palace of the Peacock (1960), The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962), and The Secret Ladder (1963).

Harris’s novels are full of ambiguous metaphors, puns, symbols with changing meanings, and the confusions of memory, imagination, dream, and reality. His characters reflect humanity’s wholeness; an archetypical figure such as Ulysses, for example, belongs not to a single culture but to all. Harris’s many novels included a trio set in London (Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness, 1977; The Tree of the Sun, 1978; The Angel at the Gate, 1982) and another trilogy comprising Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987), and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990). Jonestown (1996) centres on a survivor of the Jonestown massacre (1978). Later novels included The Mask of the Beggar (2003) and The Ghost of Memory (2006). Harris also wrote short stories and essays.

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