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How to pronounce Edwidge Danticat: Edweedje Danticah
Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection, Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist, The Farming of Bones, The Dew Breaker, Brother, I'm Dying, Create Dangerously, Claire of the Sea Light, The Art of Death, Everything Inside, a Reese's Book Club selection and National Book Critics Circle Awards winner. She is also the editor of The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, Best American Essays 2011, Haiti Noir, and Haiti Noir 2. She has written seven books for children and young adults: Anacaona, Behind the Mountains, Eight Days, The Last Mapou, Mama's Nightingale, Untwine, My Mommy Medicine, and a travel narrative, After the Dance. Her memoir, Brother, I'm Dying, was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award and a 2008 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow, a 2018 Ford Foundation "Art of Change" fellow, the winner of the 2018 Neustadt International Prize, the 2019 St. Louis Literary Award, the 2011 Bocas Nonfiction Prize and 2020 Bocas Fiction Prize, the 2020 Vilcek Prize for Literature, a 2020 United States Artists Fellow, a two-time winner of The Story Prize, and the 2023 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Her essay collection, We're Alone, was published in September 2024. She teaches at Columbia University.
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Two separate interviews with Edwidge Danticat in which she discusses The Dew Breaker and Breath, Eyes, Memory.
A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat about The Dew Breaker
Q: Can you tell us about the title of your new book The Dew Breaker?
A: The title is my English translation of a Creole expression "choukèt
laroze," which during the twenty-nine year period (1957-1986) that Haiti was
ruled by the father and son dictators, François "Papa Doc" and Jean Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, referred to a rural chief, a brutal regional leader and
sometime torturer. I have always been fascinated by the poetic naming of such a
despicable authority figure and when I started writing about a former torturer,
I decided to translate the expression in the most serene sounding way I could.
And so we have the dew breaker. I could have chosen several other ways to
translate this, the dew shaker, the dew stomper, for example, but I like the way
the words dew breaker echo the American expression ball breaker, which is a more
fitting label for these kinds of people.
Q: Why did you decide to structure the telling of the book in the way that
you do? Do you feel that this book represents a departure from your previous
works? If...
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