Yvvette edwards biography
- Yvvette Edwards FRSL is a British novelist born in London, England, of Caribbean heritage.
- Yvvette Edwards FRSL is a British novelist born in London, England, of Caribbean heritage.
- Yvvette Edwards is a British author of Montserratian origin.
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Yvvette Edwards
British novelist
Yvvette Edwards FRSL | |
|---|---|
| Born | Barnet, London, England |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Notable work | A Cupboard Full of Coats (2011); The Mother (2016) |
Yvvette EdwardsFRSL is a British novelist born in London, England, of Caribbean heritage.[1] Her first novel, A Cupboard Full of Coats, was published in 2011 to much acclaim and prize nominations that included the Man Booker Prize longlist and the Commonwealth Book Prize shortlist. Edwards followed this debut work five years later with The Mother (2016), a novel that "reinforces her accomplishment".[2] She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.[3]
Biography
Of Caribbean parentage, Yvvette Edwards was born in Barnet, north London, and was brought up by her mother, who had migrated to Britain as a child from Montserrat.[4] Edwards attended school in Hackney, east London, where she still lives with her family.[5][6][7]
Her first novel, A Cupboard Ful Yvvette Edwards has lived in London all her life. She currently resides in the East End and is married with three children. A Cupboard Full of Coats, her first novel, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.•
Yvvette Edwards
Biography of Yvvette Edwards
“The day I met my agent was the day I also discovered there was not a single white character in my book. When it was pointed out to me, I have to confess I was shocked. While my agent continued talking about how much she had enjoyed reading my novel, I smiled and carried out a silent urgent inventory of my characters. To my shock, I discovered she was right. There was not the one. It was, for me, one of those bizarre surreal moments that as a writer, I encounter far more frequently perhaps than is normal. How was it possible for someone who had grown up in London, who had written a novel based in London, about a group of Londoners no less, that something so significant could have passed me by completely? The answer, I felt, lay in the process by which the novel had come about.”
—Read more at The Author At •
A Conversation with Yvette Edwards
Yvvette Edwards was born in Barnet and grew up in the London Borough of Hackney. She continues to live in East London with her family. In an interview with Words of Colour, Yvette told how she first started writing after the death of Elvis Presley when she was 10 years old. Her mother and relatives at the time wailed as if a family member had died, so it was a way of working through the grief and trauma. She is a lover of stories of all kinds, and can sometimes be spotted frequenting the cinema and theatre, or wearing sunglasses and crouched low in shady corners suited to eavesdropping.
Yvvette only started to take her career seriously at 40 years old. Her first book, A Cupboard Full of Coats – the story of Jinx whose mother was stabbed to death in their East London home – made a big literary impact and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It went on to garner numerous other nominations, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Writers’ Guild Awards, the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and the Waverton Goo
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