Cyril Dabydeen

Who is Cyril Dabydeen?

Cyril Dabydeen is a writer who was born in the Canje, Guyana, a locality that also produced his contemporaries Arnold Itwaru and Jan Shinebourne. He grew up in a sugar plantation with the sense of Indian indenture rooted in his family background. He is a cousin of the UK writer David Dabydeen.

He began writing in the early 1960s, winning the Sandbach Parker Gold Medal for poetry and the first A. J. Seymour Lyric Poetry Prize. His first chapbook collection, Poems in Recession, was published in 1972. In his early years he taught school, from 1961 to 1970, beginning as a pupil teacher; Dabydeen received formal teacher-training during this period.

In 1970 he left Guyana for Canada to attend university; he obtained a BA degree in English at Lakehead University, an MA degree in English at Queen's University, and a Master of Public Administration degree also at Queen's University. In his early years in Canada he worked in a variety of summer jobs to pay his way through university, perhaps most importantly as a tree-planter in the Canadian forests around Lake Superior, and lived in bush camps with Native Canadians and others, sometimes six weeks at a time. It was this experience that perhaps is part of the process of the drawing of imaginative connections between Guyana and Canada, both with large "unpeopled" hinterlands and surviving native peoples.