Press release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (Toronto; November 20, 2018)

HarperCollinsCanada is thrilled to announce that Esi Edugyan’s bestselling, internationally acclaimed novel Washington Black has won the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize. The announcement was made on November 19, 2018, at Toronto’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, at a black-tie ceremony hosted by Rick Mercer. Edugyan, having previously won the Giller Prize in 2011 for her novel Half-Blood Blues, is only the third author to win the prestigious award a second time, and the only author ever to win the prize for two consecutive novels.

The esteemed five-member jury panel wrote of Washington Black, “How often history asks us to underestimate those trapped there. This remarkable novel imagines what happens when a black man escapes history’s inevitable clasp—in his case, in a hot air balloon, no less. Washington Black, the hero of Esi Edugyan’s novel, is born in the 1800s in Barbados with a quick mind, a curious eye, and a yearning for adventure. In conjuring Black’s vivid and complex world—as cruel empires begin to crumble and the frontiers of science open like astounding vistas—Edugyan has written 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.”

Washington Black was also a finalist for the 2018 Man Booker Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. On her Scotiabank Giller Prize win, Edugyan said, “I just have to say that in a climate where so many forms of truth telling are under siege, this feels like a really wonderful and important celebration of words.”