The Anglo-Ethiopian Society
Book Festival - In Search of a Better Life
Aida Edemariam & Esi Edugyan
Thursday 18th October 2018
19:45pm - Level 5 Function Room, Green side, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX.
Tickets £15 plus booking fee. Part of London Literature Festival - concessions available.
Go on a voyage of discovery with authors Esi Edugyan and Aida Edemariam, as they present stories about characters who are looking for a better life.
Discussing their latest novels, the two award-winning writers explore the universal desire for improved circumstances and how they found inspiration in history and in characters who share an unbroken spirit.
Aida Edemariam's debut The Wife's Tale is both an intimate memoir of the author's grandmother Yetemegnu and vivid a portrait of Ethiopia. Told from the perspective and in the rich language of a woman at the heart of her community, we are drawn into her fight for justice and against her husband's imprisonment.
Peopled by a cast of richly drawn characters, from proud priests to emperors and empresses, Marxist revolutionaries to wartime double agents, this is a many-layered portrait of Ethiopia that challenges misconceptions about the country, as witnessed by an indomitable woman.
Aida Edemariam is of dual Ethiopian and Canadian heritage. She grew up in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and studied English literature at Oxford University and the University of Toronto. She has worked as a journalist in New York, Toronto and London, where she is currently a senior feature writer and editor for The Guardian. She is a recipient of a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for a work of non-fiction in progress.
Esi Edugyan's novel Half Blood Blues won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize. Washington Black is her third novel. Drawing on a history with profound implications for the present, the novel is teeming with life, powered by an irrepressible character who refuses to settle for an existence of enslavement.
The novel tells the story of an eleven-year-old field slave on a Barbados sugar plantation whose quest for freedom takes him on an odyssey from the Canadian Arctic to the muddy streets of London.
Esi Edugyan was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, to Ghanaian immigrant parents. She studied creative writing at the University of Victoria, British Columbia.
Tickets, on sale from Wednesday 25 July, are available from the SouthBank website