Dreaming of Elsewhere: Observations on Home (CLC Kreisel Lecture Series) - Softcover

Edugyan, Esi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0888648219 ISBN 13: 9780888648211

Publisher: University of Alberta Press, 2014

Synopsis

Home, for me, was not a birthright, but an invention.. It seems to me when we speak of home we are speaking of several things, often at once, muddled together into an uneasy stew. We say home and mean origins, we say home and mean belonging. These are two different things: where we come from, and where we are.

Writing about belonging is not a simple task. Esi Edugyan chooses to intertwine fact and fiction, objective and subjective in an effort to find out if one can belong to more than one place, if home is just a place or if it can be an idea, a person, a memory, or a dream. How "home" changes, how it changes us, and how every farewell carries the promise of a return. Readers of Canadian literature, armchair travellers, and all citizens of the global village will enjoy her explorations and reflections, as we follow her from Ghana to Germany, from Toronto to Budapest, from Paris to New York.

About this title

Book Description

Esi Edugyan interlaces fact and fiction, storytelling and dreaming to capture the essence of belonging.

From the Back Cover

Front Flap: "Esi's Kreisel Lecture explores the concept of home. With the wild success of Half-Blood Blues, she has travelled enough in these last few years to have had time to think passionately, in lonely airport lounges and hotel beds, about belonging and home. She's had a lifetime to think about citizenship, and the complicated ways we define where we are from." -Marina Endicot, Introduction Back Flap: "I want to begin by telling you a story. It is almost entirely true." Thus begins Esi Edugyan's 2013 Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture. With the finesse of a writer who is in complete control of the worlds she creates, Esi Edugyan guides readers through her experience of home and belonging. She moves effortlessly from cities in Canada and Germany to the bustle of Accra, Ghana, as she finds her identity in the diaspora. Readers interested in travel, literature and the post-colonial search for belonging will become her willing travel companions on this journey. Esi Edugyan's most recent novel, Half-Blood Blues, won the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the 2012 BC Book Prize, the 2012 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. The novel was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, the Orange Prize, the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, and the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize. Edugyan's debut novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, was published internationally to critical acclaim. She has held fellowships in the U.S., Scotland, Iceland, Germany, Hungary, Finland, Spain and Belgium. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Alberta Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0888648219
• ISBN 13: 9780888648211
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 56