Image from Alice’s Twitter.

Ghanaian-Canadian writer Esi Edugyan is on the longlist for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, for her third novel Washington Black. She was previously shortlisted for her bestselling second novel Half Blood Blues, which also made the Women’s Prize shortlist in 2012, making her the third African to be shortlisted for the Women’s Prize.

Forthcoming in September 2018, here is a description of Washington Black, from its publishers Penguin Random House:

Esi Edugyan. Image from Globe and Mail.

Born and raised in Canada to Ghanaian expat parents, Edugyan has creative writing degrees from the University of Victoria and Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. Her debut novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, published in 2004, was shortlisted for the 2005 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. Her second novel, Half-Blood Blues, published in 2011, won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was shortlisted for Man Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize, the Walter Scott Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Governor General’s Award for English language fiction. In 2014, Edugyan published her first work of non-fiction, Dreaming of Elsewhere: Observations on Home. In 2016, she was writer-in-residence at Athabasca University, Alberta. 

Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah.

Leading Ghanaian-American philosopher and cultural theorist Kwame Anthony Appiah is the chair of the 2018 judging panel. Appiah is a professor at New York University’s Department of Philosophy and the university’s School of Law. He was named by Foreign Policy on its 2010 list of top global thinkers and received the US National Humanities Medal in 2012. He has further received the 1993 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the 1993 Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association for In My Father’s House; the 1997 Annual Book Award and the 1997 Ralph J. Bunche Award for Color Conscious; a 2007 Arthur Ross Book Award for Cosmopolitanism; The New York Times Book Review’s 100 Notable Books of 2010 and Times Literary Supplement’s Book of the Year 2010 recognitions for The Honor Code; and a 2011 New Jersey Council for the Humanities Book Award for The Honor Code, among others.

Other judges include crime writer Val McDermid, cultural critic Leo Robson, feminist writer and critic Jacqueline Rose, and artist and graphic novelist Leanne Shapton.

Here is the full longlist for the 2018 Man Booker Prize:

  • Belinda Bauer, Snap
  • Anna Burns, Milkman
  • Nick Drnaso, Sabrina
  • Esi Edugyan, Washington Black
  • Guy Gunaratne, In Our Mad and Furious City
  • Daisy Johnson, Everything Under
  • Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room
  • Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure
  • Michael Ondaatje, Warlight
  • Richard Powers, The Overstory
  • Robin Robertson, The Long Take
  • Sally Rooney, Normal People
  • Donal Ryan, From a Low and Quiet Sea

Congratulations to Esi Edugyan.