Two-time Booker Prize nominee almost gave up writing

Acclaimed Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan has had first-hand encounters with the vagaries of the publishing and book-selling worlds.

- Ong Sor Fern

The 46-year-old got off to a great start when her debut The Second Life Of Samuel Tyne, written when she was just 24, was published in 2004. The book, about an unhappy civil servant who inherits an estate in a historic black rural community, was shortlisted for the Hurston/ Wright Legacy Award.

But she could not find a publisher for her second book. Half-Blood Blues, tracing the lives of two jazz musicians caught up in Nazi Germany, was released only in 2011.

Over e-mail, the writer, who was born to Ghanaian parents in Calgary, admits frankly: "I naively thought I'd continue to write and publish with the same ease. But mine was a different industry than the one my literary heroes had inhabited."

Looking back, she says: "First novels had to perform the way first seasons of television shows must now catch fire. If you didn't secure a significant enough readership right out of the gate, no one would pick up your next book, no matter its qualities."

The featured presenter at the Singapore Writers Festival 2024 confesses that, in the battle to get her sophomore book published, “I thought I might give up writing entirely”.