Esi Edugyan | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Edugyan reading at theEden Mills Writers' Festival in 2018 | |
| Born | 1978 (age 46–47) Calgary,Alberta, Canada |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Alma mater | University of Victoria (BA) Johns Hopkins University (MA) |
| Period | 2004–present |
| Notable works | Half-Blood Blues (2011);Washington Black (2018) |
| Notable awards | Scotiabank Giller Prize 2011Half-Blood Blues Anisfield-Wolf Book Award 2012Half-Blood Blues Scotiabank Giller Prize 2018Washington Black |
| Spouse | Steven Price |
| Children | 2 |
Esi Edugyan (born 1978) is a Canadian novelist.[1] She has twice won theGiller Prize, for her novelsHalf-Blood Blues (2011) andWashington Black (2018).
Esi Edugyan was born and raised inCalgary,Alberta, to parents fromGhana.[1] She studied creative writing at theUniversity of Victoria, where she was mentored byJack Hodgins. She also earned a master's degree fromJohns Hopkins Writing Seminars.[1][2]
Herdebut novel,The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, written at the age of 24,[3] was published in 2004 and was shortlisted for theHurston-Wright Legacy Award in 2005.[4]
Despite favourable reviews for her first novel, Edugyan had difficulty securing a publisher for her second fiction manuscript.[1] She spent some time as a writer-in-residence inStuttgart, Germany. This period inspired her to drop her unsold manuscript and write another novel,Half-Blood Blues, about a youngmixed-racejazz musician, Hieronymus Falk, who is part of a group in Berlin between the wars, made up of African Americans, a German Jew, and wealthy German. The Afro-German Hiero is abducted by theNazis as a "Rhineland Bastard". Several of his fellow musicians flee Germany for Paris with the outbreak ofWorld War II. The Americans return to the United States, but they meet again in Europe years later.[1]
Published in 2011,Half-Blood Blues was shortlisted for that year'sMan Booker Prize,[5]Scotiabank Giller Prize,[6]Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize,[7] andGovernor General's Award for English-language fiction.[8] Edugyan was one of two Canadian writers, alongsidePatrick deWitt, to make all four award lists in 2011.[6][9]
On November 8, 2011, she won the Giller Prize forHalf-Blood Blues.[10][11] Again alongside deWitt's work,Half-Blood Blues was shortlisted for the 2012Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction.[12] In September 2012, in a ceremony inCleveland, Ohio, Edugyan received theAnisfield-Wolf Book Award in fiction forHalf-Blood Blues, chosen by a jury composed ofRita Dove,Henry Louis Gates Jr.,Joyce Carol Oates,Steven Pinker, andSimon Schama.[13][14]
In March 2014, Edugyan's first work of non-fiction,Dreaming of Elsewhere: Observations on Home, was published by theUniversity of Alberta Press[15] in theHenry Kreisel Memorial Lecture Series.[16][17] In 2016, she was writer-in-residence atAthabasca University inEdmonton, Alberta.[18]
Her third novel,Washington Black, was published in September 2018.[19] It won theGiller Prize in November 2018,[20] making Edugyan only the third writer, afterM. G. Vassanji andAlice Munro, ever to win the award twice.[21][22]Washington Black was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize,[23] the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize,[24] the2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction,[25] and the 2020International Dublin Literary Award.[26] The novel was selected for the 2022 edition ofCanada Reads, where it was defended byMark Tewksbury.[27]
She features inMargaret Busby's 2019 anthologyNew Daughters of Africa with the contribution "The Wrong Door: Some Meditations on Solitude and Writing".[28]
In 2021, Edugyan presented six lectures as part ofCBC Radio'sMassey Lectures series.[29] The lectures were published in a book,Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling.
Edugyan was selected as chair for the 2023Booker Prize jury, alongside fellow judgesRobert Webb,Mary Jean Chan,Adjoa Andoh andJames Shapiro.[30][31]
Edugyan lives inVictoria, British Columbia, and is married to novelist and poetSteven Price, whom she met when they were both students at the University of Victoria.[1] Their first child was born in August 2011,[32] their second at the end of 2014.[33]
