Career
He has been involved in theatre for more than 40 years, as a director, actor and playwright. His involvement with theatre began in his native Guyana when he was about 12 years old, working in school theatre, and he went on to become involved with the Theatre Guild of Guyana. Gilkes has taught at a number of universities in the Caribbean, Canada and the United Kingdom over the past 40 years, including the at the University of Kent at Canterbury, the University of Warwick, the University of Guyana, the University of the West Indies (where he served as Reader in English and Head of the English department) in Barbados and the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College in Saint Lucia.
He has recently been a Quillian Visiting Professor at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College.
In Bermuda he has directed plays and taught a theatre workshop put on by the Department of Community & Cultural Affairs at the Berkeley Institute. His work includes Couvade: a dream-play of Guyana (1974), Wilson Harris and the Caribbean Novel (1975), The Literate Imagination (1989) and Twayne.