held at the Government House in Belize City in 2022. Speakers included Francis Fonseca and Edgell's daughter, Holly. Honours Edgell was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2007 Queen's Birthday Honour List. In 2009 the University of the West Indies conferred upon her the honorary degree D.Litt. at graduation ceremonies in Cave Hill, Barbados. Works Edgell's debut novel, Beka Lamb, published in 1982, details the early years of the nationalist movement in British Honduras from the eyes of a teenage girl attending high school in the colony. Published a year after Belize became independent, Beka Lamb was the first novel to be published in the new nation and went on to claim the distinction of being Belize's first novel to gain an international audience, winning Britain's Fawcett Society Book Prize in 1982 (awarded annually to a work of fiction that contributes to an understanding of women's position in society today). Extracts from Beka Lamb have appeared in such anthologies as The Arnold Anthology of Post Colonial Literatures in English, edited by John Thieme (1996), Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby (1992), and Her True-True Name, edited by Elizabeth Wilson and Pamela Mordecai (1989). Her subsequent novel, In Times Like These (1991), portrayed the turmoil of nearly independent Belize from the point of view of another female protagonist, this time the adult director of women's affairs (a post Edgell once held). The Festival of San Joaquin (1997), her third novel, told the story of a woman accused of murdering her husband, and in her short stories, Edgell skillfully explores the layers of Belize's complicated social and racial stratification through the lens of her female protagonists. Edgell said she would eventually like to write about male protagonists as well as her extensive travels across the world. The Festival of San Joaquin, was re-issued by Macmillan Caribbean in October 2008. Edgell's fourth novel was published by Heinemann's Caribbean Writers Series in January 2007. The events of Time and the River unfold during the heyday of slavery in Belize. It focuses on the life of a young slave woman, Leah Lawson, who eventually (through marriage) becomes a slaveowner herself. She even finds herself in the position of owning her own family members. The story is told against the backdrop of the brutal forestry slavery of the time and slave revolts, true historical moments in the history