Rupert Roopnaraine (31 January 1943 â 23 February 2026) was a Guyanese cricketer, writer and politician. Roopnaraine served as Minister of Education of Guyana between 2015 and 2017.
Roopnaraine was born in Kitty, Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana). He played first-class cricket for the Cambridge University team from 1964 to 1966 and was awarded a Blue for representing the university in the annual University Match against Oxford in 1965 and 1966. As a cricketer, he was a lower order right-handed batsman and a right-arm off-break bowler.
In 2015, Roopnaraine was appointed Minister of Education of Guyana. In 2017, he was reassigned to Ministry of the Presidency, and Nicolette Henry replaced him as Minister of Education.
Primacy of the Eye: The Art of Stanley Greaves was published in 2003. Roopnaraine also contributed a substantial "Introduction" to the Peepal Tree Press 2010 edition of Edgar Mittelholzer's Shadows Move Among Them.
Roopnaraine's collection of essays, The Sky's Wild Noise, won the non-fiction category of the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. The judges commented that "in the corpus of non-fiction prose in the Caribbean intellectual tradition, only José Martàand George Lamming rival the range of Roopnaraine's capacities of response, depth of analysis and subtle and mordant style."
Roopnaraine died at the Georgetown Public Hospital on 23 February 2026, at the age of 83.