Anthony Burgess is a brilliant English novelist. I remember feeling greatly pleased on reading a review he did for the Observer on my fourth novel, The Secret Ladder from the Guyana Quartet. This happened some time before we met. I mention this now as a token of the generous, unobtrusive approach he made to the work of writers. This spirit remained with him all his life. It may be traced in his thoughtful surveys of Caribbean writers, as well as through studies of distinguished and contemporary fiction, through a shortened, explanatory edition of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and through a novel on the famous sixteenth century poet and dramatist Christopher Marlowe. He also wrote a novel on Shakespeare.

In my opinion his best novel is Earthly Powers, for which he should have received the Nobel Prize.

Sir Wilson Harris was a Guyanese novelist and essayist. He died in 2018.

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