About Zee Edgell

Personal

Zelma Inez Edgell nee Tucker

Born Oct. 21, 1940

Belize City, Belize

Married to Alvin George Edgell 1968

Children:

Holly Emma Edgell (b. 1969)

Randall Clive Edgell (b. 1975)

married to Emily Shavers Edgell

Grandchildren:

Isaac Edward Edgell (b. 2003)

Sophia Emma Edgell (b. 2004)

Simon Alexander Edgell (b. 2008)

Professional

Professor of English (retired)

Kent State University

Kent, Ohio

Writing

NOVELS

Beka Lamb (1982)

Winner, Fawcett Society Book Prize

In Times Like These (1991)

The Festival of San Joaquin (1997)

Reissued 2008/Macmillan

Time and the River (2007)

SHORT STORIES

Longtime Story (1998)

My Uncle Theopolis (1999)

Winner, Canute Brodhurst Prize

The Entertainment (2001)

My Father and the

Confederate Soldier (2006)

Zee Edgell’s Favorites

Chinua Achebe

James Baldwin

Charlotte Brontë

Edwidge Danticat

Cyprian Ekwensi

George Eliot

Ralph Ellison

Zora Neale Hurston

Jamaica Kincaid

George Lamming

Harper Lee

Doris Lessing

Toni Morrison

V. S. Naipaul

Flora Nwapa

Flannery O'Connor

Jean Rhys

Samuel Selvon

Betty Smith

Zadie Smith

Alice Walker

Virginia Woolf

Richard Wright

Links

Heinemann Caribbean Writers Series

Zee Edgell site at English Scholar

VG: Voices from the Gaps

Interview with BelizeMagazine.com

Video: Interviews with Zee Edgell from the CWSI Archives

Interview from Bomb Magazine

Biography
Zee Edgell was the first Belizean author whose work reached an international audience.
Her first novel, Beka Lamb (Heinemann 1982), has become a modern classic of Caribbean Literature. An entire generation of people in the Caribbean read Beka Lamb as part of their high school literature curricula. The book has been translated into German, is taught at universities in the United States and the Caribbean, and is enjoyed by readers around the world.
Edgell was born in Belize City, then the capital of a country known as British Honduras. Her father, Clive Tucker, worked his way up through the ranks of an import and export company, eventually retiring as a director. Edgell’s mother, Veronica Tucker (nee Walker) was a homemaker who enjoyed writing poetry.
The Tuckers raised a large family: Zelma (the eldest), Barry, Clive, Laura, Martha, Monica and Ava. Another child, Alexander, died of malaria as a child. Zee Edgell also had a half brother, Lenton.
Edgell began her writing career as a journalist, working as an apprentice for the Daily Gleaner in Kingston, Jamaica. Later she worked for a London women’s magazine while she studied journalism at the Regent Street Polytechnic.
Returning to Belize in her late twenties, Edgell began teaching at her former high school, St. Catherine Academy. At the same time, she started a modest Chamber of Commerce newsletter which grew into The Reporter a leading Belizean newspaper that is published to this day.
Zelma “Zee” Tucker married American Al Edgell in 1968. Edgell was serving as the director of CARE in Belize at the time. The couple left Belize in 1969, when their daughter Holly was two months old.
Al Edgell’s career in international development would take the family around the world: to Nigeria, the United Kingdom, Afghanistan (where son Randall was born in 1975), Bangladesh, and Somalia. The family also lived briefly in Menominee, Michigan, Al Edgell’s hometown.
In 1986 the Edgell family moved to Belize, where both Zee and Al became lecturers at the University College of Belize (now the University of Belize).
Edgell recently retired as a tenured English professor (creative writing) at Kent State University, after sixteen years. She and her husband relocated to St. Louis, Missouri to be close to their children and grandchildren. Zee has published four novels, four short stories, travels around the world for readings and conferences, and continues learn and grow in her craft.
In October 2009, the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados awarded Edgell with an honorary doctor of letters degree.

1st Edition of Beka Lamb 1982