Maggie Harris

Maggie Harris is a Guyanese poet, prose writer, and visual artist.

She was awarded the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2000 and 2014 for her collections of poetry Limbolands and Sixty Years of Loving, and received the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the Caribbean region in 2014 for Sending for Chantal.

Early life

Harris is originally from Guyana and migrated to the United Kingdom in 1971. In 2006, she moved to Wales from Thanet, Kent, where she lived since 1973. After ten years she relocated to Thanet, where she currently lives. She attended the University of Kent as a mature student where she received a BA in African and Caribbean studies and an MA in Post-Colonial Studies. She taught creative writing in Broadstairs as part of the adult education offering at the University of Kent and was appointed an International Teaching Fellow at the University of Southampton.

Literary career

Before moving to writing, Harris was a visual artist since her schooldays where she was taught by the Guyanese artist Stanley Greaves. She exhibited her work during the 1980s in libraries and galleries, including at the University of Kent and The Mall Galleries in London. The cover of her book 60 Years of Loving features her artwork. In 2002, she founded the first live literature festival, Inscribing the Island, in Thanet to which she invited many Black British and Caribbean writers, including Valerie Bloom and Jackie Kay.

She has published six collections of poetry, three collections of short stories, and a memoir, and has recorded poems for children (Anansi Meets Miss Muffet). Her work has appeared in publications such as The Lampeter Review, Wasafiri, The Caribbean Writer, and Poetry Wales. She has performed her work across the UK and in Barbados, and has represented Kent in Europe. In 2011, she published her memoir Kiskadee Girl (Kingston University Press) which centres on her childhood in the Caribbean.

Two of her poems have been commissioned for public art installations. 'Dear Mr Dickens' appeared at The Catalpa Tree, Rochester Cathedral as part of The Empty Chair Poetry Trail Celebrating Charles Dickens. As a competition winner, her poem 'Canterbury' is on display in Canterbury's Westgate Gardens. In 2016, she was commissioned by the BBC to write her poem Lit by Fire about the North Foreland Lighthouse in Broadstairs for National Poetry Day. Her poetry was featured in a number of anthologies, including Red: Contemporary Black British Poetry (Inscribe Print, Peepal Tree Press, 2010) and Out of Bounds: British Black and Asian Poets (Bloodaxe Books, 2012).

Speaking on the themes of her work, she has said: "Generally speaking, as a writer from Guyana, themes of migration and loss, engagement with questions of 'home', history and landscape are intrinsic to my writing. The loss of homeland and 'roots' is a strong undercurrent, as is also the fact of being a woman. Journeying, settlement and motherhood are also essential themes as is the realization of being a creative person, which means that these themes are not necessarily negative ones, but a part of life." Harris has named Leonard Cohen, Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Lawrence Scott, Isabel Allende, Jean Toomer, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Pauline Melville and Grace Nichols as literary influences.

Awards and recognition

Harris won the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2000 for her first collection of poetry Limbolands and again in 2014 for Sixty Years of Loving. Her collection After a Visit to a Botanical Garden was shortlisted for the prize in 2010. She was awarded a grant by Arts Council England South East for her memoir Kiskadee Girl, which won the Kingston University Life-Writing Competition in 2008. In 2014, she won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the Caribbean for her story Sending for Chantal.

In 2016, her collection In Margate by Lunchtime was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and the following year, she won third prize in the International Welsh Poetry Competition for her poem On Watching a Lemon Sail the Sea. In 2020, she won first prize in the Wales Poetry Award for and the thing is.

She has received the University of Kent T S Eliot Prize and the Kent Outstanding Learner award. She was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Abroad Scholarship to the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill.

Bibliography

Poetry collections

• Limbolands (Mango Publishing, 1999, ISBN 1 902294 09 2)
• From Berbice to Broadstairs (Mango Publishing, 2006, ISBN 1 902294 28 9)
• After a Visit to a Botanical Garden (Cane Arrow Press, 2010, ISBN 978 0 9562901 1 3)
• Selected Poems 1999-2010 (Guyana Classics Library, 2011, ISBN 978 1 907493 34 8)
• Sixty Years of Loving (Cane Arrow Press, 2014, ISBN 978 0 9562901 7 5)
• On Watching a Lemon Sail the Sea (Cane Arrow Press, 2019, ISBN 978-0-9929388-3-3)

Short story collections

• Canterbury Tales on a Cockcrow Morning (Cultured Llama, 2012, ISBN 978 0 9568921 6 4)
• In Margate by Lunchtime (Cultured Llama, 2015, ISBN 978 0 9926485 3 4)
• Writing on Water (Seren Books, 2017, ISBN 978 1 7817237 0 8)

Memoir

• Kiskadee Girl (Kingston University Press, 2011, ISBN 978 1 899999 50 7)