Quote by Wilson Harris: “The imagination is the organ through which we apprehend a living world.”

Imagination is not escapism or decoration — it is the faculty by which we actually perceive and engage with reality in its full depth. Harris argued that realist fiction could not capture the full complexity of Caribbean experience; only imaginative literature that broke formal conventions could.

Harris delivered lectures at the University of the West Indies and in Britain in the late 1960s and 1970s, developing his theory of the 'novel of associations' as an alternative to European realism. Guyana had gained independence in 1966, and Harris was thinking about what a genuinely post-colonial literary form might look like.

Guyanese novelist and literary theorist whose experimental novels explored the layered landscapes and multicultural histories of Guyana. His 1960 novel Palace of the Peacock is considered one of the most original works of Caribbean fiction and a landmark of postcolonial imaginative literature.