Born in Haiti, Edwidge Danticat spoke only a few words of English by the age of 12, when her parents moved to New York. Her first novel was Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), and it introduced an author keen to expose her country's traumatic history and engage with the Haitian diaspora in the USA. The New York Times pronounced her one of 30 artists under 30 “likely to change the culture for the next 30 years”, and she was shortlisted for the National Book Award for her short-story collection Krik? Krak! (1995). She lost out to Philip Roth, but her sales hit six figures after Oprah Winfrey chose her first novel for the TV book club in 1998.

Edwidge was named among Granta's Twenty Best Young American Novelists in 1996 and the New Yorker’s twenty exemplars of “American fiction of the future” in 1999. The Farming of Bones (1998) received the 1999 American Book Award, the International Flaiano Prize for Fiction and also the overall Flaiano Super Prize. More recently she has edited the anthology The Butterfly’s Way, and her latest book is the deeply personal Brother, I'm Dying (2007).