Cyril Dabydeen

Cyril Dabydeen (born October 15, 1945 in the Canje) is a Guyana-born Canadian writer of Indian descent. He grew up in a sugar plantation with the sense of Indian indenture rooted in his family background (he grew up with his mother and with a grandmother—in an extended family of aunt, nieces, nephews). 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 (1964) and the first A. J. Seymour Lyric Poetry Prize (1967). 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 (a British educational tradition, e.g., D. H. Lawrence also worked 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 (First-Class Hons.) at Lakehead University, an MA degree in English(his thesis was on American poet Sylvia Plath) at Queen's University, and a Master of Public Administration degree also at Queen's University. He was twice admitted to the PhD Program at York University. In his early years in Canada he worked in a variety of summer jobs to pay his way through university, 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 is part of the process of the drawing of imaginative connections between Guyana and Canada, both with large "unpeopled" hinterlands and surviving native peoples.

He was a literary juror in 2000 and 2006 for Canada's Governor's General Award for Literature (poetry); the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (University of Oklahoma), in 2000; the James Lignon Price Competition (the American Poets University & College Poetry Prize Program) via St. Lawrence University, New York, in 2003; the Small Axe Magazine Poetry Prize (NYC)in 2011; the Bocas (Trinidad/Caribbean)Literary Prize for poetry in 2013; and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (Canada Writes, 2014), among others.

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