Wilson Harris. Photograph courtesy Faber

Sir Vidia is no longer the Caribbean’s sole literary knight. As many Antilles readers have probably heard, Wilson Harris has been granted a knighthood in the latest British honours list. “It is a great moment in Guyanese literary history,” says David Dabydeen. Though your Antilles blogger is not keen on honours that come with titles, it’s nonetheless deeply gratifying to see Harris’s contribution to literature recognised by his adopted country.

Harris is a conundrum: a major Caribbean writer of powerful imaginative and intellectual influence who is at the same time little read and even less understood. His books are difficult in almost every sense, and extraordinarily ambitious: a cumulative and profound effort to erase borders between prose and poetry, fiction and metaphysics. Harris confronts the boundaries of politics, history, and language which have divided the natural world and the human imagination, and attempts to transcend them in an act of creative restoration or recuperation. His novels are like literary time machines, bringing past, present, and future into a single frame of the imagination, but also seeking out unities of space and place. He deals with abstract concepts like eternity and infinity in moving, poetic, if usually esoteric prose. I find reading Harris simultaneously frustrating, thrilling, and profoundly moving.

Anyway, it seems an apt moment for the CRB to introduce our new Wilson Harris author index page, which lists relevant content from the magazine, plus links to other useful material elsewhere online. We’ve also just set up a page for Lorna Goodison (and we introduced our Martin Carter page last week). We’ll be adding more pages for significant Caribbean writers in the coming weeks and months — keep an eye on our subject index.