Place of birth
Guyana
National identity
Guyana
DOB
Gender
Male

Michael Gilkes

Short biography
Born in Guyana, Michael Gilkes (1933-2021) taught at the University of Guyana, the University of the West Indies in Barbados, the Sir Arthur Lewis community College in St. Lucia and was a Quillian Visiting Professor at Randolph-Macon Women’s College.

A distinguished Caribbean critic, dramatist, lecturer and film maker, his critical work includes his Wilson Harris and the Caribbean Novel, (1975), The Literate Imagination (Ed.) (also on Harris) and The West Indian NovelTwayne. His play, Couvade, was published by Cape in 1974. A Pleasant Career, a play about the life and fiction of Edgar Mittelholzer, won the prestigious Guyana Prize for Drama in 1992. Both plays are now re-issued in a single binding in the Peepal Tree Caribbean Modern Classics series.

Joanstown won the 2002 Guyana Prize for best book of poetry. He won the 2006 Guyana Prize for drama with his play The Last of the Redmen. His last published collection was ‘Heart/Land Poems of Love and Landscape’ (2015).