Esi Edugyan

Esi Edugyan was born in 1978 in Calgary, Alberta, to parents who had immigrated from Ghana, and grew up there. She moved to Victoria, British Columbia, to study creative writing at the University of Victoria, and she has lived in the province ever since.

She wrote her first novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, at 24. Published in 2004, it explores racism and mental health in Alberta in 1968 and was shortlisted for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award in 2005. Her second novel, Half-Blood Blues (2011), follows a group of Black jazz musicians in Paris and Berlin in the 1930s and 1940s, and the same story in the 1990s, drawing on a neglected vein of history.

Half-Blood Blues was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Governor General's Award and the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and on 8 November 2011 it won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada's richest literary award. It also won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2012.

In 2014 she published a first work of non-fiction, Dreaming of Elsewhere: Observations on Home. Her third novel, Washington Black (2018), follows an 11-year-old boy who is enslaved on a Barbados sugar plantation and escapes with his master's brother on a journey that takes him to Nova Scotia, England and Morocco. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, with Edugyan the only Black author on the list, and won the 2018 Giller Prize.

That made Edugyan only the third writer to win the Giller twice. Washington Black has since been adapted for television, and in 2022 it was championed on Canada Reads. She lives near Victoria with her husband, the novelist and poet Steven Price, and their children.