Born in Guyana in 1955, Dabydeen's first poetry collection, Slave Song (1984), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Quiller-Couch Prize. A professor at the University of Warwick, he is, perhaps, better known as a literary critic and novelist. However, Turner (1994), his critically acclaimed long narrative poem written in response to J M W Turner's celebrated painting Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead & Dying, remains a stunning meditation on the dark history of colonialism.