Activity Slideshow, readings, recital
Host Moray House Trust
Date 19th January 2019
AJ Seymour’s body of work has been described, by Wilson Harris, as an important horizon or boundary in Caribbean literature. Thirty years after his death, on Christmas Day 1989, he is perhaps best remembered as a poet and as the founder of the literary magazine Kyk-over-al.
In the course of 2019 the Trust hopes to host several events to pay tribute to him. It might seem odd to begin with one of his memoirs. However, as Seymour himself observed when writing them, this is an underdeveloped part of our literary landscape, frequented mainly by politicians.
This event featured extracts from A.J Seymour’s first autobiography, entitled Growing Up in Guyana. He wrote five memoirs in all, self-published in the 1970s and 1980s. Seymour said he wrote this memoir with the intention of “recreating some of the Georgetown and Guyana that used to be when I was growing up.” In it, Seymour conjured an era in Georgetown, a way of life and a cast of characters long gone.