Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the Canada Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
Half-Blood Blues in 2011 and Washington Black in 2018 — two Scotiabank Giller Prizes, Canada's biggest fiction award, which only a handful of writers have won twice.
Esi Edugyan was born in Calgary to Ghanaian parents who had emigrated in the 1970s, and has written about growing up Black in a prairie city where almost nobody else was.
Half-Blood Blues, published in 2011, follows a group of jazz musicians in Berlin and Paris as the Nazis close in, centred on a mixed-race German trumpeter of the kind the regime classified and then disappeared. It won the Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker. She had struggled to place it; her publisher collapsed while the book was in production.
Washington Black, in 2018, begins on a Barbados sugar plantation and takes an eleven-year-old enslaved boy through a hot-air balloon escape to the Arctic, Nova Scotia, London and Morocco — an adventure novel that is also an argument about what freedom actually costs. It won her a second Giller and was again shortlisted for the Booker.
She has also written non-fiction on race and on the way art records it, and delivered the CBC Massey Lectures.
Half-Blood Blues, published in 2011, follows a group of jazz musicians in Berlin and Paris as the Nazis close in, centred on a mixed-race German trumpeter of the kind the regime classified and then disappeared. It won the Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker. She had struggled to place it; her publisher collapsed while the book was in production.
Washington Black, in 2018, begins on a Barbados sugar plantation and takes an eleven-year-old enslaved boy through a hot-air balloon escape to the Arctic, Nova Scotia, London and Morocco — an adventure novel that is also an argument about what freedom actually costs. It won her a second Giller and was again shortlisted for the Booker.
She has also written non-fiction on race and on the way art records it, and delivered the CBC Massey Lectures.
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