Race, nature and discrimination in three panels

Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan used to be a veritable night owl. At 10pm, she and fellow writer husband Steven Price would brew a pot of coffee and hunker down for a grueling night of writing that usually ended only close to 4am.

- Clement Yong

Sleep time was from 5am to 1pm - "but then we had children", Edugyan said during her meet-the-author session at the Singapore Writers Festival (SWF) on Nov 15.

In an hour-long sharing mostly focused on craft, the acclaimed author of black historical fiction like Half-Blood Blues (2011) and Washington Black (2018) spoke gently of the pain of removing characters during the editing process. Her husband, she said, is her "ruthless" first reader - a dynamic which they have cultivated since meeting in writing school.

And though she is now forced to write only during school hours, she still eases into each block of work by reading "sparkling" prose, usually by Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison. Writer's block sends her scurrying to her trusty legal pad, where "writing by hand releases me from the sense that everything has to be perfect".