Cyril Dabydeen Biography

Canadian poet, born in Berbice, Guyana; he emigrated to Canada in 1970 and studied at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. Formerly a schoolteacher in Guyana, he taught at Algonquin College, Ottawa, from 1975 to 1981. In 1986 he became a teacher of creative writing at the University of Ottawa, taking up Canadian citizenship in 1976; he was appointed Poet Laureate of Ottawa in 1985. His poetry and fiction display a recurrent concern with the tensions of displacement and adjustment in relation to the experience of immigration. Collections of his verse include Poems in Recession (1972), Heart's Frame (1979), Islands Lovelier than a Vision (1986), and Coastlands: New and Selected Poems (1989). His vivid and inventive poetry draws equally upon his experiences of Canada and Guyana. His prose works include the short stories of Still Close to the Island (1980) and Jogging in Havana (1992), and the satirical novel The Wizard Swami (1989).