Christy Edwall was born in South Africa in 1985. She has a doctorate in English Literature from Oxford, and her writing has appeared in Granta.com, Stinging Fly, the Southern Review, and the Times Literary Supplement. She lives in Brighton.
Edwall's new novel is History Keeps Me Awake at Night.
At the Guardian she tagged ten top imaginary journeys in literature, including:
A Voyage Out by Virginia WoolfRead about the other entries on the list.
For Rachel Vinrace, the protagonist of Woolf’s first novel, the reality of South America is deadly. Having accompanied heraunt and uncle on the Euphrosyne to an unnamed South American country – with a cameo by Clarissa Dalloway en route – Rachel’s voyage is metaphorical as much as it is existential. When the English travellers arrive at their destination, the landscape of this South American country is generically tropical – hot afternoons, burning suns, lurking fevers – the sort of landscape you might cobble together from books. The subject is empire: Woolf imagines the “Elizabethan barques” which had anchored where the “Euphrosyne now floated”. The interior is full of “Indians with subtle poisons” and the coasts with “vengeful Spaniards and rapacious Portuguese”.
--Marshal Zeringue
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