Esi Edugyan on the Massey Lectures, the near-failure of 'Half-Blood Blues', and why she never Googles herself

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Esi Edugyan is a two-time Giller winner for 'Half-Blood Blues' and 'Washington Black.' She's a public intellectual. She's not a nutritionist. What else do you want to know? MasseyLectures

Is Esi Edugyan Armenian?Armenian? Maybe her name gets confused with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish president, but he’s not Armenian either.

Her feelings are not so simple. Her success as a writer has taken her all over the world. After residencies in Europe, Edugyan compiled her thoughts on belonging for the Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture Series, published as“I didn’t have an innate sense of feeling perfectly at home anywhere,” she continues. “In the wider world, your differences are made clear to you although you don’t necessarily feel yourself to be different.

She published her first book at 26. She had been in a library at the University of Virginia, where her husband was doing graduate work, and she came across a book on Black settlers. She discovered that there was a settlement of freed Black slaves in Amber Valley, north of Edmonton. That detail became the basis of the novel, set in the late ’60s. A Black man uproots his family and moves to an inherited homestead in rural Alberta.

“I was in such despair,” Edugyan says. This is the second time in our conversation that she uses the word. “It took so much to write the book and then for all of that to happen. It seemed like a disaster.” And what if her writing career hadn’t worked out? What if she had stuck to her plan to change course after the ghost novel, or if“Oh, I don’t know,” she says. “I was thinking about maybe going to law school or becoming a nutritionist.”And if there’s anything we know about Edugyan based on her novels, it’s that she loves history and loves research., an adventure tale and slave narrative set in the 19th century, also won the Giller and was shortlisted for the Booker.

 

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