Reading: Esi Edugyan and Steven Price

Esi Edugyan reads from her debut novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne. A young, promising immigrant from Ghana leads the existence of a small civil servant in Calgary. He unexpectedly inherits a villa and realizes he is being given the notorious second chance. As his desire for success grows, his life falls apart all around him. Edugyan will also read from her latest novel, The Egotist, the story about the life of a classical musician set in the post-Second World War period.

In his poetry collection Anatomy of Keys, Steven Prince explores the life of Hungarian/American escape artist and magician Harry Houdini from his childhood to premature death. Inspired by Houdini’s unbelievable escapes, Price’s poems are the basis for a deep and passionate contemplation on being.

Esi Edugyan (1977 in Calgary, Canada) studied literary writing at the University of Victoria and Johns Hopkins University. She was an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University, and has been teaching at the University of Victoria since 2003. Her debut novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, appeared in the 2004 through Knopf Canada in the “New Face of Fiction” series, and has since been published in the USA, Great Britain and the Netherlands. Esi Edugyan has been an Akademie fellow since March 2006.

Steven Price (born in Colwood, Canada) teaches poetry and creative writing at the University of Victoria. His poems were published in Canada’s most renowned anthology Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets. He just finished his first novel and is presently working on a collection of essays.

The readings will be in English and German, admission free.