Generally I tend towards dark, moody imagery, probably in the quest for 'depth'. In this photograph of Canadian Novelist Esi Edugyan there was already so much depth that my goal was to try to keep the painting 'light' but retain the 'weight'. My good friend Jane Bathard-Smith wrote a piece on Esi when I first posted the portrait - here it is again, thank you Jane. Only the third writer ever to win the Giller Prize twice, Esi Edugyan is an undeniably important voice in literature bringing race and black history to the fore. Sensitively and without sensation Edugyan reveals abominations in the treatment of human beings that readers might never have imagined. Half-Blood Blues cleverly unwraps the story of a mixed-race jazz musician in Berlin who is abducted by the Nazis and disappears.

Labelled a “Rhineland Bastard” in a world where racial hatred is trending, Hieronymus Falk’s story vanishes into the guilt-ridden pits of black history. Silent until Edugyan creates a frame narrative to serve up this story of personal betrayal and political tyranny, it opens our eyes to the absurdities of racism and what it can make people do. Washington Black, Edugyan’s third novel (2018), with similar interweaving of narrative playfulness and serious historical revelations, tells the story of Washington ‘Wash’ Black, a slave on a Barbados Sugar plantation who is lifted out of slavery and into a strange sort of freedom. Never really ‘free’, Wash is trailed by the perpetual spectre of slavery even after its abolition. Both terrified and fascinated by freedom, Wash battles an impulse to be free against a need to belong. Edugyan’s intellectual explorations are never too earnest; instead they are delightfully pulsed with tones of the mythical and the fabulous.