Fugue and Other Writings

Overview

Combining poetry, short stories, autobiographical essays, and critical writing, this comprehensive collection grants unrivalled access to an individual’s passage through a rural Jamaican childhood, his literary influences, and involvement and frustration with postcolonial politics. In all manners of writing, including pieces that have never seen print before, his range and full vision are finally exposed in this compilation that demonstratively reveals Neville Dawes as an important and visionary critic on the development of Caribbean writing, the place of Africa in Caribbean culture, and the importance of seeing the region as a unified whole across language barriers. Introduced in an essay that brings both a scholar’s objective placement of this work in the context of Jamaican and Caribbean writing as well as a son’s moving and insightful response to his father’s work in relation to the triumphs and struggles of his own life, this invaluable and emotional anthology proves the touching and unrelenting qualities of an influential writer.

Author Biography

Neville Dawes was an acclaimed writer, the director of the Institute of Jamaica, the author of the novels Interim and The Last Enchantment, and the critical work Prolegomena to West Indian Literature. Kwame Dawes is the son of Neville Dawes and is a distinguished poet in residence and a Louis Frye Liberal Arts professor in the college of liberal arts at the University of South Carolina (USC), the founder and still director the USC Poetry Initiative, and the executive director of the USC Arts Institute. He lives in Columbia, South Carolina.