Death of Professor Baugh ‘a huge loss’ – Grange

Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport, Olivia Grange, has hailed literary giant Professor Edward Baugh, and noted that his passing is “a huge loss to Jamaica and the Caribbean”.

Edward Baugh, who was born in Port Antonio, Portland, on January 10, 1936, died December 9, just about a month shy of his 88th birthday.

Minister Grange said that Baugh will be remembered for a distinguished academic career during which he focused on West Indian literature, especially the study of Anglophone Caribbean poetry, and in particular the work of Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott.

Baugh began writing poetry while a student at Titchfield High School in Portland. He won a scholarship to study English literature at the then University College of the West Indies (now The University of the West Indies) and later did postgraduate studies at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, and at the University of Manchester, where he earned a PhD in 1964.

“It is with much pleasure that I can remind us that in 2012 he was awarded a Gold Musgrave Medal by the Institute of Jamaica. He was also the co-recipient of the 2021 Bocas Henry Swanzy Award along with colleague and fellow poet, Professor Mervyn Morris. That award celebrates the contributions of editors, broadcasters, publishers, critics and others who have devoted their careers to developing Caribbean literature,” Grange said in a press release.

Professor Baugh’s poems appeared in various magazines and anthologies years before the publication of his first collection.

“It would require much more than this medium to say enough about the works of Professor Edward Alston Cecil Baugh, literary giant and public orator, whose voice has now gone quiet but whose legacy will resound with us for a long time,” Grange stated.

Professor Baugh taught at the Cave Hill campus of The University of the West Indies (UWI) and later joined the faculty at the university’s Mona campus. He was appointed professor of English in 1978 and UWI’s Public Orator in 1985. He also held visiting appointments at the University of California, Dalhousie University, University of Hull, University of Wollongong, Flinders University, Macquarie University, University of Miami and Howard University.