Cyril Dabydeen
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Cyril Dabydeen (born 1945) is a writer who was born in the Canje, Guyana, a locality which also produced his contemporaries Arnold Itwaru and Jan Shinebourne. His family were too poor to permit him to attend high school. His father was a marginal cattle farmer, his mother a seamstress. He grew up with his grandmother and an extended family of aunt, nieces, nephews. He is a cousin of the writer David Dabydeen.
He began writing in the early 1960s, winning the Sandbach Parker Gold Medal for poetry in 1964. His first collection of poems, Poems in Recession, was published in 1972.
In the early 1970s he left Guyana for Canada where he obtained a BA (First class Hons) at Lakehead University, an MA (his thesis was on Sylvia Plath) and an MPA (Master of Public Administration) at Queen's University. In his early years in Canada he worked in a variety of casual jobs, most importantly as a tree planter in the Canadian forests of the north, where he worked with Native Canadians. It was this experience which was part of the process of the drawing of imaginative connections between Guyana and Canada, both with large ‘unpeopled’ hinterlands and surviving native peoples.
He was literary juror in 2000 for the Canada's Governor's General Award for Literature, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the James Lignon Price Competition (the American Poets University & College Poetry Prize Program).
He has been a finalist four times for Canada's Archibald Lampman Poetry Prize, as well as for the Guyana Prize. He received the City of Ottawa’s first award for Writing and Publishing, and a Certificate of Merit, Government of Canada (1988) for his contribution to the arts. He is a regular book critic for World Literature Today (University of Oklahoma).
He has worked for many years in human rights and race relations in Canada, and currently teaches in the Department of English, University of Ottawa.
