Esi Edugyan

Biography

Born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, to Ghanaian immigrant parents, she studied creative writing at the University of Victoria and Johns Hopkins University before publishing her debut novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, in 2004.

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, which inspired her to drop her unsold manuscript and write another novel, Half-Blood Blues, about a mixed-race jazz musician in World War II-era Europe who is abducted by the Nazis as a "Rhineland Bastard".

Published in 2011, Half-Blood Blues was announced as a shortlisted nominee for that year's Man Booker Prize, Scotiabank Giller Prize, Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and Governor General's Award for English language fiction. She was one of two Canadian writers, alongside Patrick deWitt, to make all four award lists in 2011. On 8 November 2011, she won the Giller Prize for Half-Blood Blues. Again alongside deWitt, Half-Blood Blues was also shortlisted for the 2012 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. In April 2012, it was announced that Edugyan had won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Half-Blood Blues.

In 2014 she published her first work of non-fiction Dreaming of Elsewhere: Observations on Home with the University of Alberta Press. In 2016 Edugyan was writer-in-residence at Athabasca University in Edmonton, Alberta.

Personal life

Edugyan lives in Victoria, British Columbia, and is married to novelist and poet Steven Price. Her first child was born in August, 2011.

Works