Esi Edugyan Popular Books

Esi Edugyan Biography & Facts

Esi Edugyan (born 1978) is a Canadian novelist. She has twice won the Giller Prize, for her novels Half-Blood Blues (2011) and Washington Black (2018). Biography Esi Edugyan was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, to parents from Ghana. She studied creative writing at the University of Victoria, where she was mentored by Jack Hodgins. She also earned a master's degree from Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.Her debut novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, written at the age of 24, was published in 2004 and was shortlisted for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award in 2005.Despite favourable reviews for her first novel, Edugyan had difficulty securing a publisher for her second fiction manuscript. She spent some time as a writer-in-residence in Stuttgart, Germany. This period inspired her to drop her unsold manuscript and write another novel, Half-Blood Blues, about a young mixed-race jazz 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 the Nazis as a "Rhineland Bastard". Several of his fellow musicians flee Germany for Paris with the outbreak of World War II. The Americans return to the United States, but they meet again in Europe years later.Published in 2011, Half-Blood Blues was shortlisted for that year's Man Booker Prize, Scotiabank Giller Prize, Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and Governor General's Award for English-language fiction. Edugyan was one of two Canadian writers, alongside Patrick deWitt, to make all four award lists in 2011.On November 8, 2011, she won the Giller Prize for Half-Blood Blues. Again alongside deWitt's work, Half-Blood Blues was shortlisted for the 2012 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. In September 2012, in a ceremony in Cleveland, Ohio, Edugyan received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in fiction for Half-Blood Blues, chosen by a jury composed of Rita Dove, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Joyce Carol Oates, Steven Pinker, and Simon Schama.In March 2014, Edugyan's first work of non-fiction, Dreaming of Elsewhere: Observations on Home, was published by the University of Alberta Press in the Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture Series. In 2016, she was writer-in-residence at Athabasca University in Edmonton, Alberta.Her third novel, Washington Black, was published in September 2018. It won the Giller Prize in November 2018, making Edugyan only the third writer, after M. G. Vassanji and Alice Munro, ever to win the award twice. Washington Black was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. The novel was selected for the 2022 edition of Canada Reads, where it was defended by Mark Tewksbury.She features in Margaret Busby's 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa with the contribution "The Wrong Door: Some Meditations on Solitude and Writing".Edugyan was selected as chair for the 2023 Booker Prize jury, alongside fellow judges Robert Webb, Mary Jean Chan, Adjoa Andoh and James Shapiro. Personal life Edugyan lives in Victoria, British Columbia, and is married to novelist and poet Steven Price, whom she met when they were both students at the University of Victoria. Their first child was born in August 2011, their second at the end of 2014. Works The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (2004) Half-Blood Blues (2011) Dreaming of Elsewhere: Observations on Home (2014) Washington Black (2018)References External links Esi Edugyan. Discover the Esi Edugyan popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Esi Edugyan books.

Best Seller Esi Edugyan Books of 2024

  • The African Samurai synopsis, comments

    The African Samurai

    Craig Shreve

    Set in late 16thcentury Africa, India, Portugal, and Japan, The African Samurai is a powerful historical novel based on the true story of Yasuke, Japan’s first foreignborn samurai ...

  • The Things We Thought We Knew synopsis, comments

    The Things We Thought We Knew

    Mahsuda Snaith

    Ten years ago, two girls’ lives changed forever.Now one of them is ready to tell their story.'A quirky lovable mystery and a brilliant, heartbreaking debut' Stylist'A new face of f...

  • KLfG Extrakt - Kanadische Gegenwartsliteratur synopsis, comments

    KLfG Extrakt - Kanadische Gegenwartsliteratur

    Sebastian Domsch

    Kanadische Literatur der Gegenwart ist Weltliteratur – Literatur von globalem Format und Wirkung, prestigeträchtig ausgezeichnet (Nobelpreis für Alice Munro, Booker­Prize und Fried...

  • Stories from Quarantine synopsis, comments

    Stories from Quarantine

    The New York Times

    A stunning collection of new fiction previously published as The Decameron Project and originally commissioned by The New York Times Magazine as the COVID19 pandemic first spread a...

  • The Journey Prize Stories 33 synopsis, comments

    The Journey Prize Stories 33

    David Chariandy, Esi Edugyan & Canisia Lubrin

    This muchanticipated, gamechanging special edition of Canada's premier annual fiction anthology celebrates the country's best emerging Black writers.For over thirty years, The Jour...