AUTHOR STRIKES GILLER GOLD AGAIN
Winning novel features boy escaping slavery with plantation owner’s kin
Esi Edugyan wins literary award for second time for ‘engrossing novel about friendship and love,’
Victoria-based author Esi Edugyan says her second time winning the $100,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize for her latest novel
Washington Black felt all the more meaningful amid a climate in which truth is “under siege.”
Published by Patrick Crean Editions, the novel follows the saga of an 11-year-old boy who escapes slavery at a Barbados sugar plantation with the help of the owner’s kinder brother.
Edugyan secured the top prize after a season flush with acclaim for Washington Black, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Writers’ Trust fiction award.
As she took to the stage Monday night at the Ritz-Carlton in Toronto, Edugyan sighed as she admitted she didn’t prepare a speech, because she didn’t expect to win.
“In a climate in which so many forms of truth telling are under siege, this feels like a really wonderful and important celebration of words,” she told the crowd, which included notables such as acclaimed author Margaret Atwood, actor Gordon Pinsent and former Ontario premier Bob Rae.
Runners-up included Patrick deWitt for French Exit, Thea Lim for An Ocean of Minutes, Sheila Heti’s Motherhood and Songs for the Cold of Heart by Eric Dupont, translated from French by Peter McCambridge.
Edugyan’s first Giller win was for Half-Blood Blues in 2011, when she also beat out fellow contender deWitt.
Alice Munro and M.G. Vassanji have also won the Giller twice.
Edugyan said the triumph felt different this time around, saying she felt like she was taking a risk with the subject matter in Washington Black.
“I sort of feel maybe that it’s opened me to writing about anything,” she said. “Stories of the marginalized, it’s extremely important to get those out there, and for us to be reading them, and trying to imagine ourselves into other skins, and not closing ourselves down.
“It’s part of, I think, keeping the dialogue alive, and keeping empathy alive.”
A five-member jury praised Washington Black as “a supremely engrossing novel about friendship and love and the way identity is sometimes a far more vital act of imagination than the age in which one lives.”
The Giller Prize, celebrating its 25th year, was founded by the late Jack Rabinovitch in honour of his wife, Doris Giller, a former books editor at the Star who died of cancer in 1993.