Bestselling Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan writes richly imagined and impeccably researched stories that illuminate complicated truths about race and belonging. The first Black woman to win the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious literary award, and only the third writer to twice win, her “ingenious storytelling gifts” (Fresh Air) have been hailed as “perfectly executed… soaring” (The Boston Globe).

Edugyan was born the daughter of Ghanian immigrants in Calgary, Alberta. Echoes of their experience can be found in her literary debut, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, which was shortlisted for the 2005 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. The elegant and atmospheric novel tells the story of an ambitious Ghanian immigrant who unexpectedly inherits his uncle’s crumbling mansion in Aster, Alberta. Founded by African-Americans as an all-black town, Aster at first seems an idyll and a refuge, but slowly reveals itself to be something more sinister. Booklist called it “a beautifully rendered and haunting look at personal longing and family obligations.”

While on a fellowship in Stuttgart, Germany, she began research for what would become her stunning second novel, Half-Blood Blues which O, the Oprah Magazine named one of the best books of the year. It was awarded the Scotiabank Giller Prize and earned nominations for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for English language fiction, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

The novel transports us to 1939 Berlin, where The Hot Time Swingers, a popular jazz band, have been forbidden to play by the Nazi government. The band’s star is the young, gifted trumpet player Hieronymus Falk, a “Rhineland Bastard,” or a child born to a white German mother and a black African father, who is later arrested in Paris and never heard from again. Years later, bandmate Sid Griffiths returns to Berlin to discover what happened to his former friend.

“Destined to win a wide audience.… Deftly paced in incident and tone, moving from scenes of snappy dialogue, in which band members squabble and banter humorously, to tense, atmospheric passages of description.… Edugyan makes fresh tracks in this richly-imagined story.… Half-Blood Blues itself represents a kind of flowering―that of a gifted storyteller.”

―The Toronto Star

It also marked Edugyan as a writer mining untapped historical veins for rich materials. “It’s a natural curiosity about footnotes – historical footnotes. Things that we haven’t heard about,” she told Quill & Quire in 2018. “When I come across a reference in a text that I find appealing or haven’t heard of before, I feel compelled to express something about it.”

Such was the case with Washington Black, which was inspired by the story of the Tichborne Claimant. In the 19th century, a British aristocrat, Roger Tichborne, was shipwrecked and presumed dead. His grief-stricken mother never gave up hope, and when she later heard that he might be alive and living in Australia, she sent Andrew Bogle, a former slave, to find out if the Claimant could be her long-lost son.

It was the hidden narrative of Bogle’s life that led Edugyan to create the character of George Washington Black (“Wash”), a young slave who is pulled from the fields of a 1830s Barbados sugar plantation to become a manservant to an abolitionist and inventor known as Titch, who takes the youth under his wing and teaches him about the larger world. After Wash witnesses a shocking event, the pair make a late-night escape from the plantation in the hot-air balloon they developed, the Cloud-cutter, and though their fates will soon diverge, their transformative friendship deftly reveals the complexity of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized.

Though it starts as a take on the antebellum novel, Edugyan describes the book as having a post-slavery narrative: “It’s about what happens after, what do you do with your life, what do you make of it, how do you begin to know how to have a sense of self… and how do you try to live in the world when everything you know has been blood and violence and… you’re in a world that rejects you.”

Washington Black received a rapturous reception, being named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Slate, TIME and Entertainment Weekly, was one of President Obama’s Favorite Books of 2018, and was a New York Times Bestseller. It was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the International Dublin Literary Award, and would go on to land the author her second Giller Prize. The occasion prompted The Globe and Mail to declare Edugyan to be “the most ambitious novelist in Canada, one who combines scope with technical chops. The grand historical narratives she spins – Nazi Germany in Half-Blood Blues, 19th-century slavery, trade and science in this one – are meticulously researched, perfectly plotted, real stories with high stakes, suspense, moments of gory violence, conclusive endings (the hardest thing for even the most imaginative of novelists to come up with).” Washington Black will be adapted for a limited television series, with Edugyan serving as executive producer.

“Esi Edugyan has a rare talent for turning over little known stones of history and giving her reader a new lens on the world, a new way of understanding subject matter we arrogantly think we know everything about.”

―Attica Locke, author of Bluebird, Bluebird

In 2020, Edugyan was invited to deliver the prestigious CBC Massey Lectures, exploring the relationship between art and race. This incisive analysis was collected into Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling. Through the lens of visual art, literature, film, and the author’s lived experience, Out of the Sun examines the depiction of Black histories in art, offering new perspectives to challenge the accepted narrative. History is a construction; what happens when we begin to consider stories at the margins, when we grant them centrality? How does that complicate our certainties about who we are, as individuals, as nations, as human beings? “An essential reckoning with how history is made” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), Out of the Sun illuminates myriad varieties of Black experience in global culture and history.

Edugyan is also the author of Dreaming of Elsewhere: Observations on Home, a non-fiction work published in 2014. She is at work on a new novel and a children’s book. Born in Calgary, she lives in Victoria, B.C. with her husband, the novelist and poet Steven Price, and their two children.