Roy Heath
| Roy A. K. Heath | |
|---|---|
| Born |
13 August 1926 Georgetown, British Guiana |
| Died | 14 May 2008 (aged 81) London, England |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Nationality | Guyanese |
| Alma mater |
University of London Lincoln's Inn |
| Notable works |
The Murderer (1978); "The Georgetown Trilogy": From the Heat of the Day (1979), One Generation (1980), Genetha (1981) |
| Notable awards |
Fiction Prize; Guyana Prize for Literature |
| Children | 2 sons, 1 daughter |
Roy Aubrey Kelvin Heath (13 August 1926 – 14 May 2008) was a Guyanese writer who settled in the UK, where he lived for five decades. He was most noted for his "Georgetown Trilogy" of novels (also published in an omnibus volume as The Armstrong Trilogy, 1994), consisting of From the Heat of the Day (1979), One Generation (1980), and Genetha (1981). Heath said that his writing was "intended to be a dramatic chronicle of twentieth-century Guyana". His work has been described as "marked by comprehensive social observation, penetrating psychological analysis, and vigorous, picaresque action."
Roy Heath was born and grew up in Georgetown in what was then British Guiana, and "had African, Indian, European and Amerindian blood running through his veins". He was the second son and youngest of the four children of Melrose Arthur Heath (d. 1928), head teacher of a primary school, and his wife, Jessie de Weever (d. 1991), music teacher. Educated at Central High School, Georgetown, he worked as a Treasury clerk (1944–51) before leaving for England in 1951.
He attended the University of London (1952–56), earning a B.A. Honours degree in Modern Languages. He also studied law and was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1964 (and to the Guyana bar in 1973), although he never practised as a lawyer, pursuing a career since 1959 as a writer and a schoolteacher in London, where he lived until his death at the age of 81. In his later years he had suffered from Parkinson's disease.
Rohan Heath, founder of the band Urban Cookie Collective, is his son.
Although Heath left British Guiana in 1951, "it never left him. He only ever wrote about his mother's land, never his adopted home." As Mark McWatt notes: "Guyana is always the setting for his fiction, and its capital and rural villages are evoked in the kind of powerful and minute detail that would seem to require the author's frequent visits." However, "Although [Heath's] fiction has fed richly upon his obsessive and meticulous memories of Georgetown and the coastland, his novels cannot be called celebrations of the place and its people. They seem to reveal instead the failures and shameful inadequacies of individual and community."
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