A New Statesman Book of the Year 2021

In this piercing and unforgettable memoir, the award-winning poet reflects on a year of turbulence, fear and hope.

For acclaimed British-Guyanese writer Fred D'Aguiar, 2020 was a year of personal and global crisis. The world around him was shattered by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the United States, California burned, and D'Aguiar was diagnosed with stage-4 cancer.

Year of Plagues is an intimate, multifaceted exploration of these seismic events, which trouble and alienate D'Aguiar from community, place and body. Combining personal reminiscence and philosophy, drawing on music and on poetry, D'Aguiar confronts profound questions about the purpose of pursuing a life of writing and teaching in the face of overwhelming upheavals; the imaginative and artistic strategies a writer can bring to bear as his sense of self and community are severely tested; and the quest for strength and solace necessary to help forge a better future. Drawn from distinct cultural perspectives - his Caribbean upbringing, London youth and American lifestyle - D'Aguiar's beautiful and challenging memoir is a paean of resistance to despotic authority and life-threatening disease.

In his first work of non-fiction, D'Aguiar subverts the traditional memoir with highly charged language that shifts from the quotidian to the lyrical, from the personal to the metaphysical. Both tender and ferocious, Year of Plagues is a harrowing yet uplifting genre-bending memoir of existence, protest, and survival.



Fred D'Aguiar was born in London of Guyanese parents. He spent his childhood in Guyana and returned to the UK for his secondary and tertiary education. He has lived and taught in the US since the 1990s. He is a professor of English at UCLA, where he teaches literature and creative writing. He lives in Mid-City Los Angeles with his family and spends some time with his wife, Debbie, rescuing stray cats. Dexter, the family dog, doesn't mind since two of his house pals, Clementine and Moonlight, are cats.