Pedro Pérez Sarduy

Pedro Pérez Sarduy (born 1943) is an Afro-Cuban writer and broadcaster, who has published poetry and fiction, in addition to journalism. He gives lectures and reads his work at academic institutions internationally and in the early 1980s became resident in London, UK.

Biography

Pedro Pérez-Sarduy was born in 1943 in Santa Clara, Cuba, where he was raised. He said in a 2016 interview: "When I was young I won a short story competition and in 1962 I went to Havana when the National School of Arts (ENA) was being created. I suddenly found myself on the 6th floor of the Havana Libre hotel training as a literary advisor so that I could show people in the countryside how they could make their story into a story." He studied English, American and French literature and language at the University of Havana. From 1965 until 1979, he was a current affairs journalist for Cuban National Radio and also worked on television on the first African and Caribbean music show in Cuba. After becoming resident in London, he worked in the Latin American department of the BBC World Service (between 1981 and 1994). and was described by poet and critic Nancy Morejón as "a chronicle of an un-chronicled social psychology".

He also co-edited with historian Jean Stubbs Afro-Cuba: An Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics and Culture (1993). He was a Ford Foundation Writer in Residence at Columbia University, New York (1989), on the CUNY Caribbean Exchange Program at Hunter College (1990), a Rockefeller Visiting Scholar at the University of Florida, Gainesville 1993), in 1997 at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, and on the Rockefeller Fellowship Caribbean 2000 Program. He has also been a Charles McGill Fellow Visiting Lecturer at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut (Fall 2004), and Associate Fellow of the Caribbean Studies Centre at London Metropolitan University.