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Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (born 24 March 1921) is a Guyanese writer. He first wrote poetry, but since has become a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be quite abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter very wide-ranging.

Wilson Harris was born in New Amsterdam in the then British Guiana. After studying at Queen's College in the capital of Guyana, Georgetown, Harris became a government surveyor, before taking up a career as lecturer and writer. The knowledge of the savannas and rain forests he gained during his time as a surveyor has formed the setting for many of his books, with the Guyanese landscape dominating his fiction.

He came to England in 1959 and published his first novel Palace of the Peacock in 1960. This became the first of a quartet of novels, The Guyana Quartet, which also includes The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962), and The Secret Ladder (1963). He later wrote the Carnival trilogy consisting of Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987), and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990).

His most recent novels are Jonestown (1996), which tells of the mass-suicide of a thousand followers of cult leader Jim Jones; The Dark Jester (2001), his latest semi-autobiographical novel, The Mask of the Beggar (2003), and one of his most accessible novels in decades, The Ghost of Memory (2006).

Wilson Harris also writes non-fiction and critical essays and has been awarded honorary doctorates by several universities, including the University of the West Indies (1984) and the University of Liège (2001). He has twice been winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature.

Harris was knighted in the 2010 Birthday Honours.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Wilson Harris", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0