Winner of the 2014 Guyana Prize for Fiction, Johnson's Dictionary is set variously in 18th century London and Demerara in British Guiana. It is a celebration of the skills of the enslaved as organisers, story-tellers, artists and mathematicians, hidden in the main from their white masters and mistresses, that is resonant with an undying human urge for freedom.

Galley, gallery, gallimaufry: In a novel set in 18th century London and Demerara (in British Guiana), that might be dreamed or remembered by Manu, a revenant from Dabydeen's epic poem, "Turner", we meet slaves, lowly women on the make, lustful overseers, sodomites and pious Jews - characters who have somehow come alive from engravings by Hogarth and others.

Hogarth himself turns up as a drunkard official artist in Demerara, from whom the slave Cato steals his skills and discovers a way of remaking his world.

The transforming power of words is what enlightens Francis when his kindly (or possibly pederastic) master gifts him a copy of Johnson's Dictionary, whilst the idiot savant, known as Mmadboy, reveals the uncanny mathematical skills that enable him to beat Adam Smith to the discovery of the laws of capital accumulation - and teach his fellow slaves their true financial worth.

From the dens of sexual specialities where the ex-slave Francis conducts a highly popular flagellant mission to cure his clients of their man-love (and preach abolition), to the sugar estates of Demerara, Dabydeen's novel revels in the connections of Empire, Art, Literature and human desire in ways that are comic, salutary and redemptive.

David Dabydeen was born in Guyana in 1957. He is only the second West Indian writer, following VS Naipaul, to be named a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Turner: New and Selected Poems (Cape, 1994) was republished by Peepal Tree in 2002. His 1999 novel A Harlot's Progress was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His other novels include Disappearance (Peepal Tree, 2005) and Molly and the Muslim Stick (2008). He co-edited the Oxford Companion to Black British History (2007), and his documentaries on Guyana have appeared on BBC TV and radio. David is now Professor at the Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick.

David Dabydeen was born in Guyana. He was sent to England at the age of twelve, and was in care until he was sixteen. He read English at Cambridge, and has published seven earlier novels and three collections of poetry. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. In 2008 he was awarded the prestigious Anthony N Sabga Caribbean Award.

In his best novel since A Harlot's Progress, David Dabydeen returns to the 18th century, this time for a historical adventure through London and the sugar-cane colony of Demerara, British Guyana. Again Dabydeen takes inspiration from the art of Hogarth and its dens of iniquity: we meet slaves, lowly women on the make, lustful overseers and pious Jews. But it is in his master's copy of Johnson's Dictionary that the slave Francis finds the transformative power of words, and his own path to freedom and redemption.