Esi Edugyan wins $50,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize
VINCE TALOTTA/TORONTO STAR
By Greg Quill
Entertainment Reporter
Esi Edugyan, 33, was awarded the $50,000 Giller Prize — Canada’s richest literary award — at a gala ceremony in Toronto Tuesday night for her second novel, Half-Blood Blues.
Edugyan, the Calgary-born daughter of Ghanaian immigrants (she’s based now in Victoria), wrote the winning novel — about an African-German jazz musician in the Rhineland who disappears during the first months of World War II — after an academic residency in the German city of Stuttgart in 2007.
“I didn’t expect this, and I’ve only scrawled a few things on a piece of paper,” she said breathlessly after fighting her way to the podium through a crowd of about 400 of the country’s top literary figures, publishers, politicians and business leaders, standing in her honour.
Edugyan thanked Giller Prize founder Jack Rabinovitch, husband of the late literary editor and journalist Doris Giller, after whom the annual award is named, “for keeping me in diapers for a while.” (She and her husband, poet and novelist Steven Price, are first-time parents of a daughter, born in August.)
After the ceremony Edugyan told the Star she felt no additional pressure about winning such an important award, after triumphing over fellow nominees Patrick deWitt (The Sisters Brothers), Zsuzsi Gartner (Better Living Through Plastic Explosives), Michael Ondaatje (The Cat’s Table), David Bezmozgis (The Free World) and Lynn Coady (The Antagonist).
“No pressure,” she said. “I feel a bit removed from everything out on the West Coast, and I’ll continue to do what I do, and at my own pace.”
Along with Vancouver-born novelist deWitt, Edugyan was shortlisted this season for the Man Booker Prize, the Writers’ Trust Award, the Giller and the Governor General’s Award, which is to be announced Nov. 15.
DeWitt, based in Portland, Ore., won the Writer’s Trust Award on Nov. 1.
Edugyan’s win Tuesday evens the field in what has been described as this year’s big stakes literary horse race.
Edugyan is a graduate of the creative writing program at the University of Victoria. Her work has appeared in several major anthologies, including Best New American.
“Any jazz musician would be happy to play the way Edugyan writes,” says the Giller jury citation. “Her style is deceptively conversational and easy, but with the simultaneous exuberance and discipline of a true prodigy.”
The awards ceremony was staged at the Four Seasons Hotel in Yorkville and broadcast live on CBC’s digital TV service, bold.
The event, which was hosted by CBC radio and TV presenter Jian Ghomeshi, opened with a performance by renowned Chinese classical pianist Lang Lang.
In an attempt to upgrade what has been viewed in the past as a solemn event, the public broadcaster brought in pop and rock stars Robbie Robertson (who has started writing his own memoir, due in 2014), Jacob Hoggard from the band Hedley, Nelly Furtado, actors Lisa Ray and Zaib Shaik (Little Mosque on the Prairie) and CBC hockey commentator Ron MacLean to introduce pre-produced monologues with Giller contenders.
Republished with permission from toronto.com
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