How a Guyanese, UK-based author began a new life in a foreign country

MEET Margaret ‘Maggie’ Harris, a Guyanese United Kingdom-based award-winning author whose upbringing in Guyana has considerably influenced her writing. Now the proud author of 11 books, she wants to revisit the land of her birth soon. She hopes to meet fellow writers and see more of her country while there, and she is also preparing to host a poetry reading session at Moray House on April 2 at 17:00 hrs.

A new life

The 70-year-old, who now resides in Kent, UK, left Guyana in 1971 when she was 17 years old. Born and raised in New Amsterdam, Berbice, she completed her secondary education at Berbice High School before leaving.
Maggie’s father died very suddenly in 1969, and her mom was left with four girls to raise on her own.

Having family in the UK, she decided that maybe it was best to relocate the family there. So she decided to send Maggie over to an uncle in the UK before moving with the rest of the family 18 months later.
“It was very hard for her,” Maggie recalled in an interview with Pepperpot Magazine, and selling the family home took some time. For her, it was somewhat exciting to be going to another country.

“When you’re 17, going to another country, you think the country is going to be like in all the movies you’ve seen. But really, it was quite isolating because I left my friends, my school mates; we had a great time as teenagers growing up together and doing things,” she recalled.

But the entire family had to start their lives all over again. “My mom had to go to work which she had never really done before because she was a house wife, so it was a very different life; some of the girls were young and had to go to school here.”

Maggie had always enjoyed art and writing but she couldn’t pursue becoming an artist due to college and high fees, so she ended up working in other fields for some time. She hadn’t any qualifications, but she was always good at English and Art.

Honing the skill

When she got married around 22, she started going to part-time classes in art and writing and did exhibitions of her pictures. Even when her children were still young, she’d still do exhibitions in the library and different places, and would also perform at and host poetry events, something that she said is very big in the UK.

At 39, Maggie, mother of three daughters, went to university as a mature student and went through the process of going to college. She attended the University of Kent in Canterbury and earned a Bachelor of Arts with honours in African and Caribbean Studies and then a Master’s in post-colonial studies because she was very interested in writing about Guyanese, the Caribbean and diaspora.

Accolades

Completing her memoir of growing up in Guyana titled “Kiskadee Girl”, Maggie won the Guyana Prize for Literature two times, in 2000 and then in 2015. She also won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the Caribbean in 2004 and the Wales Poetry Award some years ago.

Maggie has taught adult education at the University of Kent and was an international teaching fellow at South Hampton University. With all of the experience garnered over the years in the literary field, she is looking forward to meeting Guyanese writers who have an interest in furthering their career.
She wants to visit places in Guyana that she did not have an opportunity to do when she was younger and hopes for a positive turnout at her Moray House poetry reading on April 2.