26 Facts About Wilson Harris

Sir Theodore Wilson Harris was a Guyanese writer.

Wilson Harris initially wrote poetry, but subsequently became a novelist and essayist.

Wilson Harris's writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter wide-ranging.

Theodore Wilson Harris was born on 24 March 1921, in New Amsterdam in British Guiana, where his father worked at an insurance company.

Wilson Harris's parents were Theodore Wilson Harris and Millicent Josephine Glasford Harris.

Wilson Harris married his first wife Cecily Carew in 1945.

Wilson Harris allowed Harris to sometimes quote her work in his epigraphs.

Wilson Harris subsequently wrote the Carnival trilogy: Carnival, The Infinite Rehearsal, and The Four Banks of the River of Space.

Wilson Harris wrote non-fiction and critical essays and was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of the West Indies and the University of Liege.

Wilson Harris was deemed by the Crown a Knight Bachelor in June 2010, in the Queen Elizabeth II Birthday Honours.

In 2014, Wilson Harris won a Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.

Wilson Harris has been admired for his exploration of the themes of conquest and colonization as well as the struggles of colonized peoples.

Wilson Harris has been faulted for his novels that have often nonlinear plot lines, and for his preference of internal perceptions over external realities.

Wilson Harris's writing has been associated with many different literary genres by critics, including: surrealism, magic realism, mysticism and modernism.

However, it is not until Susan Forrestal in The Waiting Room that Wilson Harris writes a woman protagonist, and not until Mary in The Angel at the Gate can we see a fully-fleshed out character with emotional depth.

However, later critical work such as by Hena Maes-Jelinek, Paget Henry and Andrew Bundy argued that Wilson Harris was instead drawing on aesthetic resources of syncretism of African and Amerindigenous systems of belief and practice.

The technique of Wilson Harris has been called experimental and innovative.

Wilson Harris sees language as the key to social and human transformations.

Wilson Harris's approach begins with a regard of language as a power to both enslave and free.

Wilson Harris cites language as both a crucial element in the subjugation of enslaved and indentured people, and the means by which the destructive processes of history could be reversed.

In Palace of the Peacock, Wilson Harris seeks to expose the illusion of opposites that create enmities between peoples and cultures.

Wilson Harris noted in an interview that "in describing the world you see, the language evolves and begins to encompass realities that are not visible".

Wilson Harris attributed his innovative literary techniques as a development that was the result of being witness to the physical world behaving as quantum theory.

Wilson Harris's writing has been called ambitiously experimental and his narrative structure is described as "multiple and flexible".

Wilson Harris categorized his innovations and literary techniques as quantum fiction.

Wilson Harris died on 8 March 2018, at his home in Chelmsford, England, of natural causes.