Guyanese David Dabydeen nominated for 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature

December 28, 2025

Award-winning academic and Guyana Prize recipient David Dabydeen says he has been officially nominated for the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature by European and Chinese scholars, making this one of the rare occasions that a small nation has a nominee.

“I am happy that I come from a small country. We are probably one of the smallest countries to have someone nominated for a Nobel, apart from St Lucia,” he told Stabroek Weekend in an interview a few days ago.

“I’m just glad for Guyana,” he said. “I have been returning to Guyana two to three times a year since 1992, and everything I write is about Guyana, even though I left when I was a boy of 14.”

Dabydeen, 68, who is currently working on a new book of essays on Guyanese and Caribbean postcolonial literature, believes that this country is in an intellectual and creative space where seasoned writers and others in the literary field can do much to inspire the younger generation. Now a fellow at the University of Cambridge, he grew up in New Amsterdam and later attended Queen’s College. “New Amsterdam produced some of the best writers and statesmen,” he said. It has been 41 years since he published his first book, an anthology of poems called “Slave Song”, and his name is still being called in awards ceremonies, the latest being the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

One piece of advice he offered to budding writers is the need to read the work of their seniors in the field. “The most inspiring act you can do as a young writer is to read other writers so as to get a sense of the techniques they use, the way they avoid clichés, the way they come up with startling images and extraordinary metaphors and the way they give a freshness to creating characters; generally, the philosophical insights that they offer a reader,” he said.

Educated at Cambridge, Oxford and London universities, Dabydeen was appointed Professor of Literature at the University of Warwick (1984-2019) and is currently back at Cambridge University working on indentureship as well as directing the Ameena Gafoor Institute for the Study of Indentureship and its Legacies.

He has published eight novels, three collections of poems and books on the history and culture of Guyana, the Caribbean and the post-colonial world. He has also been Guyana’s ambassador to UNESCO (1994 to 2010) and to China (2010 to 2025), creating cultural and educational links between countries and Guyana. Whilst in China, he worked closely with Chinese authorities to set up a Confucius Institute at the University of Guyana.

Dabydeen was awarded, in 2008, the Anthony N Sabga Award for Excellence in Arts and Letters, the largest literary prize in the Caribbean, commonly known in the region as the Caribbean equivalent of the Nobel Prize. His first book of poems, “Slave Song”, was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1984. For a first draft of a selection of these poems, Dabydeen was awarded the inaugural University of Cambridge Quiller Couch Prize for Creative Writing, in 1978.

His first novel, “The Intended” (1991) was shortlisted for the John Llewllyn Rhys Prize, awarded in Britain annually for the best work of literature by an author written in English from the Commonwealth. It won the Guyana Prize for Fiction. His novel, “The Counting House” (1996) was shortlisted for the 1998 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize, one of the richest literary prizes in the world (US$115,000) for a single work of fiction (the prize was won by Herta Muller who went on to win the 2009 Nobel Prize). His novel, “A Harlot’s Progress” (1999) was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Britain’s oldest prize for fiction.

The novel won the Guyana Prize for Fiction that year. In 2004, Dabydeen was awarded the Raja Rao Prize for Literature, given to writers who have made an outstanding contribution to the literature and culture of the South Asian Diaspora. Raja Rao was a preeminent Indian novelist (1908-2006).

Dabydeen has been one of Britain’s public intellectuals, writing and presenting BBC TV and radio programmes on colonisation; on painting the common people; on the connection between slave revenues and grand architecture and art collecting in Britain; and on the lives and writings of early African-British 18th and 19th century authors like Olaudah Equiano Ignatius Sancho and Mary Seacole and actors and theatre producers like Ira Alridge.

He was the first Guyanese to be made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2000.

Source: Stabroek News