When was zee edgell born

This novel depicts the events of slavery in Belize. Over the years, the Belizean author took time to visit schools around Belize to meet with young people studying her work and read to them from her books.

Her last such activity in Belize took place in , with a visit to E. Yorke High School. She is pre-deceased by three brothers, Clive Tucker Jr. For the first time in the history of the island's community newspaper, The San Pedro Sun is appealing to their thousands of readers to help support the paper during the COVID pandemic. Since we have tirelessly provided vital local and national news. Now, more than ever, our community depends on us for trustworthy reporting, but our hard work comes with a cost.

We need your support to keep delivering the news you rely on each and every day. Every reader contribution, however big or small, is so valuable. This was a very liberating discovery for a young girl whose greatest ambition was to be a writer and whose best friends were the characters in the books that she read, and, of course, their authors.

In high school I did read Dickens and Shakespeare. We had to memorize our parts. I loved David Copperfield because Dickens too, in that book, wrote about ordinary people. I loved reading about faraway places removed from the everyday realities of my own life.

My second greatest ambition was to travel to as many places in the world as possible. My early exposure to books and literature affected my sense of country, community and culture very positively because the books I read taught me how to write about my country and community as other writers wrote about theirs.

As I grew up, my family passed their love of Belize on to my sisters, brothers, and me. I knew even as a young girl that I was going to write about the country of Belize.

The birth of the nationalist movement happened in Belize in , when I was about nine years old, so through the political meetings and family discussions I learned a lot about the Belizean situation.

The Belizean songs, poems, and stories were probably responsible for my life script. As a young girl, my relatives took me upriver, where I spent many holidays in the Sibun bush. At other times, I spent holidays on one of the offshore islands. So love of country came naturally to me and, of course, I knew that I lived in the most beautiful country in the world because my relatives said so, and I had great faith in them.

Or did you take your influences from elsewhere? I am sure that I have been influenced by every book, fiction and nonfiction, that I have ever read. BE When did you first engage with the possibility of becoming a writer, and how was the role of writer viewed by your community? Did you forsee obstacles? ZE I knew that I wanted to be an author at the age of Their reaction made me feel very good inside.

In primary school, and later, I had teachers always nuns who encouraged my ambition. My mother was a great reader so she understood my ambition. My father did not think much of the idea, but he did everything he could to encourage my journalism career. I am so glad that he read Beka Lamb more than once before he died. My husband also encouraged me during the writing of Beka Lamb , and now my grown children do the same. My community has encouraged my efforts from the very first, for example, when I returned home to teach, and to practice journalism, also later when Beka Lamb was launched in Belize, and also when In Times Like These and The Festival of San Joaquin were published.

When I left home at the age of about 19, I did not foresee any outside obstacles to becoming a writer, except that I had to practice my writing until I had reached a point where I felt that it was as good as I could make it.

As an avid reader, it was easy for me to know when my work had reached the standard necessary for publication. Beka Lamb took me ten years, from idea to publication, but I enjoyed the process. We had two small children then, and that first novel grew during the years when we lived in Nigeria, Afghanistan, the United States, and Bangladesh, where the novel was finished.

But I want to probe this issue further. You wanted to be an author from the age of 11, and you knew you wanted to write about your country. Who were the published Belizean or British Honduran writers at that time, and what did they write about? My own first novel, Lara , is about a young, mixed-race English Nigerian girl, her family and her roots. I felt compelled to get the story down and put it onto the literary landscape. Beka Lamb is a portrait of a young girl in Belize, and you create a very detailed tapestry of the world around her.

Even at the early age of 11, did you somehow perceive that the society you knew had yet to reflected in literature, had yet to be written into being?

ZE I had no idea that the society I knew had yet to be reflected in world literature. Belizean writers were not known abroad, but they were known in Belize. I suppose you could say that, starting with the Maya, Belize has had a year literary heritage.

Martinez, S. Singh and a number of others were well known. At that time I did not know of any women who were writers, although there are many now. I have read that the ancient Mayas are said to have developed a calendar and a complex system of writing based on pictoglyphs, hieroglyphs, and phonetics. These symbols can be seen on stone, ceramics, walls, and paper.

I believe they considered writing to be sacred, so access to the texts were limited to their priests, rulers, and other elite. However, their work can be seen today in many museums and universities. There are some texts with well-known names, e.

The burning of many Mayan and other texts during the Spanish Conquest was a great cultural loss. The earliest inhabitants of Belize were the Maya, as far as anyone knows. A number of stelae have been discovered in the Belize area as well at other Maya sites, I believe. The present-day Maya continue to pass on their languages, traditions, myths, and stories.

BE I have a couple of writer friends who live in very small countries and who agonized over publishing their first novels because they were writing about the communities they came from, and they feared people would feel judged and respond by attacking.

In one case this did happen, and the writer was ostracized for a while. She worked as a journalist, serving as the founding editor of The Reporter. She has also lived for extended periods in such diverse places as Jamaica, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Somalia, working with development organizations and the Peace Corps. She has been director of women's affairs for the government of Belize, lecturer at the former University College of Belize forerunner to the University of Belize and she was an associate professor in the department of English at Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, where she taught creative writing and literature.

Edgell also tours internationally, giving book readings and delivering papers on the history and literature of Belize. She is considered Belize's principal contemporary writer.

Edgell is married to American educator Al Edgell, who had a decades-long career in international development. They have two children, Holly, a journalism professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, and Randall, a physician specializing in stroke treatment and prevention. Edgell has also contributed extensively to the Belizean Writers Series, published by local publishing house Cubola Productions.

She edited and contributed stories to the fifth book in the series, Memories, Dreams and Nightmares: A Short Story Anthology of Belizean women writers , published in In the University of the West Indies conferred upon her the honorary degree D.