Year of Plagues, Fred DAguiar
Year of Plagues, Fred DAguiar
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Year of Plagues
A Memoir of 2020

Author: Fred D'Aguiar

Narrator: Fred D'Aguiar

Unabridged: 12 hr 33 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Harper

Published: 08/03/2021

Synopsis

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. Combining personal reminiscence and philosophy, 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 two cultural perspectives—his Caribbean upbringing and his 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 nonfiction, D’Aguiar subverts the traditional memoir with highly charged language that shifts from the lyrical to the quotidian, from the metaphysical to the personal. While his experience could not be darker, its rendering is tinged with light and joy, captured in prose that unfolds in wonderful, unexpected ways. Both tender and ferocious, Year of Plagues is a harrowing yet uplifting genre-bending memoir of existence, protest, and survival.

About Fred D'Aguiar

Poet, novelist and playwright, Fred D’Aguiar was born in London to Guyanese parents. He grew up in Guyana, returning to England in his teens. He trained as a psychiatric nurse before reading English with African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He is the author of five novels, including, Children of Paradise, about Jonestown, Guyana. His first novel, The Longest Memory (Pantheon, 1994), won both the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. His eight poetry book and most recent, Letters to America is a UK, Poetry Book Society Choice. His numerous plays have been staged in the UK and broadcast on BBC radio. He was awarded the Guyana Prize in Fiction and in Poetry and was Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Cambridge University. He has lived in the US since the 1990s and taught at Amherst College, University of Miami and Virginia Tech. Currently he is Professor of English at University of California Los Angeles. 

Reviews

Goodreads review by Steve

Prostate Cancer in the Time of Pandemic The author is a poet and a professor of English and Creative writing. He has crafted an incredible intellectual and emotional tale of his encounter with cancer. It crosses lines between the black experience and western culture. From Motown to Dylan. from Kendri......more

Goodreads review by Kara

I didn't really know anything about prostate cancer. Now I know perhaps too much. A little meandering but interesting.......more

Goodreads review by K C

Interesting memoir although that was not my reason for reading this book. I read it since 2020 was also a year that my husband was being treated with aggressive prostate cancer as well as dealing with corona and I wanted to compare the experiences. D'Aguiar, as a professor of English and a poet, is......more

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