Roy Heath

Roy Aubrey Kelvin Heath (13 August 1926 – 14 May 2008) was a Guyanese writer who settled in the UK, where he lived for five decades. He was most noted for his "Georgetown Trilogy" of novels (also published in an omnibus volume as The Armstrong Trilogy, 1994), consisting of From the Heat of the Day (1979), One Generation (1980), and Genetha (1981). Heath said that his writing was "intended to be a dramatic chronicle of twentieth-century Guyana". His work has been described as "marked by comprehensive social observation, penetrating psychological analysis, and vigorous, picaresque action."[1]

Biography

Roy Heath was born in what was then British Guiana, and "had African, Indian, European and Amerindian blood running through his veins".[2] He was the second son and youngest of the four children of Melrose Arthur Heath (d. 1928), head teacher of a primary school, and his wife, Jessie de Weever (d. 1991), music teacher.[3] Educated at Central High School, Georgetown, he worked as a Treasury clerk (1944–51) before leaving for England in 1951. He attended the University of London (1952-6), earning a B.A. Honours degree in Modern Languages. He also studied law and was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1964 (and to the Guyana bar in 1973), although he never practised as a lawyer, pursuing a career since 1959 as a writer and a schoolteacher in London, where he lived until his death at the age of 81. In his later years he had suffered from Parkinson's disease.[4]

Writing

Although Heath left British Guiana in 1951, "it never left him. He only ever wrote about his mother's land, never his adopted home."[5] As Mark McWatt notes: "Guyana is always the setting for his fiction, and its capital and rural villages are evoked in the kind of powerful and minute detail that would seem to require the author's frequent visits."[6]

His short story "Miss Mabel’s Burial" was published in 1972 in the Guyanese journal Kaie; another story, "The Wind and the Sun", appeared in the Jamaican journal Savacou two years later.[7]

His first novel, A Man Come Home, was published in London in 1974. This was followed four years later by The Murderer (1978), which won the Guardian Fiction Prize that same year and was described by the Observer as "mysteriously authentic, and unique as a work of art". The Murderer was also listed in 1999's The Modern Library: 200 Best Novels in English since 1950 by Carmen Callil and Colm Tóibín.

Heath's other published novels are Kwaku; or, The Man Who Could Not Keep His Mouth Shut (1982), Orealla (1984), The Shadow Bride (1988) and The Ministry of Hope (1997). His novels "capture the anxieties of modernity in the face of crippling economic forces and explore the burdens of the past defined by slavery, indentured labor, and Amerindian disenfranchisement."[8]

He also wrote non-fiction, including Shadows Round the Moon: Caribbean Memoirs (1990), and plays - his Inez Combray was produced in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1972, in which year he won the Guyana Theatre Guild Award.

In 1983, during a vacation to Guyana,[6] Heath delivered the Edgar Mittelholzer Memorial Lecture, entitled “Art and Experience”,[9] in Georgetown. In the lecture Heath said: "The price the artist pays for his egotism is a high one. On one level egotism obliges him to create, while the same egotism threatens to destroy him. Success not only goes to his head, it remains there, creating demands he cannot hope to satisfy. I am acutely aware of all of this and therefore try to shun gratuitous publicity."[10]

In 1989 he was awarded the Guyana Prize for Literature for his novel The Shadow Bride,[9] about which Publishers Weekly wrote: "Heath's modest, unpretentious style undergirds a powerful realism as his subtle analysis of family conflicts builds to a tragic and moving climax."[11]

Bibliography

Novels

Memoir

Short stories

Lecture

References

  1. ↑ Roy Heath Biography, JRank.
  2. ↑ "Roy A. K. Heath", The West Indian Encyclopedia.
  3. ↑ Louis James, "Heath, Roy Aubrey Kelvin (1926–2008)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, January 2012; accessed 2 March 2015/
  4. ↑ Margaret Busby, "Roy AK Heath" (obituary), The Guardian, 20 May 2008.
  5. ↑ "Roy A. K. Heath", West Indian Encyclopedia.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Mark A. McWatt, "Roy A. K. Heath", in Daryl Cumber Dance, Fifty Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographic-Critical Sourcebook, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986, pp. 207-16.
  7. ↑ David Katz, "Roy Heath: A Man Goes Home", Caribbean Beat, Issue 93, September/October 2008.
  8. ↑ "Heath, Roy (1926-)", in Carole Boyce Davies, Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora: Origins, Experiences, and Culture, ABC-CLIO, 2008, p. 522.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 "UK-based novelist Roy Heath dies at 82", Kaieteur News obituary, 16 May 2008.
  10. ↑ Art and Experience, p. 28, quoted in McWatt (1986), p. 208.
  11. ↑ Review in Publishers Weekly, October 30, 1995.

Further reading

External links