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Mar 27, 2007

Belizean author launches latest novel

Story PictureTomorrow night Belizean author Zee Edgell will officially launch her fourth novel, Time and the River. Set in 1798, the book chronicles the life of Leah Lawson, a slave living in Roaring Creek. This afternoon Edgell stopped by our studios to explain that while writing about slavery was painful, it was also liberating.

Zee Edgell, Author
“At the end I felt very free. I felt by trying to retrace the, not retrace but trying in my imagination to get an idea of what my African ancestors lives were like, even though it was painful to research and write, I feel freer now because I understand better the environment in which I’m living and why some things happen as they do at least in my experience.”

“I’d sit at the type writer and I’d hear Nat King Cole singing and I thought, “why this tune?” you know. I didn’t know. Sometimes a book has a melody and that was the melody for that. I didn’t know the words for the song. I only knew a few lines: time and the river, how swiftly they go by. I knew that and I just heard his voice.”

“Writing about Belize is kind of an obsession for me I think. You know, I keep saying I’ll write another kind of book just as a break from it, take a break from it you know but I never can form the intention. Even if I form it for a short time and do some writing, I’m always thinking about Belize and its history, because there’s so much to write about, it’s a treasure trove of novels and stories and poems.”

Time and the River will be officially launched at the Bliss Centre for the Performing Arts at seven on Wednesday night. Her previous novels are Beka Lamb, In Times Like These, and The Festival of San Joaquin. Edgell is currently an associate professor of English at Kent State University in Ohio.


Viewers please note: This Internet newscast is a verbatim transcript of our evening television newscast. Where speakers use Kriol, we attempt to faithfully reproduce the quotes using a standard spelling system.

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