Roy Heath

Born in what was then British Guiana, Roy Heath (1926–2008) grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Georgetown and in the coastal village of Agricola. In 1950, he moved to London to pursue graduate studies in modern languages; for many years he worked as a schoolteacher of French and German. He published his first novel, A Man Come Home (1974), at the age of forty-eight; his second novel, The Murderer, received the Guardian Fiction Prize. He would publish eight more books, all of them set in Guyana, a country to which he often returned.