Paul Edwards (literary scholar)

Paul Geoffrey Edwards (31 July 1926 – 10 May 1992) was a wide-ranging literary scholar at the University of Edinburgh, appreciated for his "adventurous and unorthodox teaching".

As a scholar of black history and literature, Edwards's work on Olaudah Equiano "helped to establish Equiano as a key figure in African and black literature in general." Edwards also wrote on Romanticism, and collaborated with Hermann Pálsson in translations of the Icelandic sagas and other books on the literature of medieval Iceland.

Paul Edwards, from Birmingham, studied English at Durham University and then Celtic and Icelandic at Cambridge University. He then worked in West Africa for nine years, teaching literature in Ghana and Sierra Leone. The demand of his African students for African literature propelled his encounter with Equiano.

Edwards joined the staff of Edinburgh University in 1963. Encouraged by Chinua Achebe, and helped by the historian of Sierra Leone Christopher Fyfe, in 1967 Edwards published an abridged edition of Equiano's autobiographical Narrative in Heinemann's African Writers Series, under the title Equiano's Travels. He subsequently published a facsimile version of the Narrative, and another edited version under the title The Life of Olaudah Equiano.

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