Fred D’Aguiar was born in London of Guyanese parents and grew up in Guyana before returning to London for his secondary and tertiary education. His twelve books include novels, poems and plays with some essays in journals and magazines. His latest novel, inspired by events at Jonestown, is Children of Paradise (Granta, February 2014). The Longest Memory won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 1994 and along with Feeding the Ghosts (which won the Guyana Prize in 1998) was translated into Spanish and eleven other languages. After a number of UK writing and teaching residences, including the Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Cambridge and Northern Arts Literary Fellow at Newcastle and Durham Universities, he is now teaching in the Masters of Fine Arts Program at Virginia Tech in the States.