Quote by Esi Edugyan: “History is what the people in power choose to remember.”

Official history is not an objective record — it is a selection, made by those with the power to preserve or destroy evidence, to memorialize or forget. Understanding this means asking always: whose experience is missing from the story we have been told?

Washington Black was published in 2018, at a moment when debates about historical monuments, colonial memory, and whose history gets told were intensifying in North America, Britain, and the Caribbean. Edugyan set her novel partly on a Barbadian sugar plantation, using the eighteenth century to interrogate present-day questions about historical record and erasure.

Canadian novelist of Ghanaian descent whose novel Washington Black won the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2018. Her work explores Black history, freedom, and identity across the Atlantic world, including the Caribbean plantation system and the history of slavery.