The Language of Eldorado

Winner of the Guyana Prize, The Language of Eldorado has been long recognised as an outstanding work of Caribbean poetry. Its beauty lies in its ability to convey complex ideas through concrete images that work on the reader both sensually and intellectually. Its focus is the relationship between language, landscape and the history of human settlement in Guyana. The collection is dedicated to Wilson Harris whose challenging and paradigm-changing ideas on these matters deeply influenced Mark McWatt’s own thinking.

Mark McWatt is the recently retired Professor of West Indian literature at UWI, Cave Hill. He was born in Guyana in 1947. He took his first degree at the University of Toronto, then went to Leeds University to complete a Ph.D. In addition to his Commonwealth prize-winning collection of stories, Suspended Sentences, Mark McWatt has written three collections of poetry, Interiors (1989), the Guyana Prize-winning The Language of Eldorado (1994), and The Journey to Le Repentir.