Literature

The forerunner of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and the negritude movement, the American WEB Du Bois has dedicated his life to the fight against racism and to the defense of black culture. Her monumental work, which consists of sociological and historical essays, but also of fictions and autobiographical narratives close to prose poetry, strikes the astonishing modernity in the analyzes of the balance of power between races in the United…

Tsitsi Dangaermbga is the great lady in Zimbabwean letters. She became famous by publishing in 1988 her first novel "Nervous conditions". "The book we have been waiting for so long and which we should all read," said Doris Lessing about this first novel by the Zimbabwean novelist. Tsitsi Dangarembga is also a filmmaker and feminist and political activist.…

Goncourt des lycéens won by Cameroonian author Djaïli Amadou Amal for his novel "Les Impatientes" published by Emmanuelle Collas. A book about the condition of women in the Sahel and the violence they can fall victim to. It is a price that "represents a lot" for Djaïli Amadou Amal. During the presentation of the high school…

After a career in satirical journalism, the Senegalese Pape Samba Kane returned to his first literary and artistic love. With two collections of poems and a novel published over a decade, the 60-year-old has established himself as one of the greatest voices in African literature. "I am the fruit of you / Of your laughter that makes me eat / You guava my nostalgia /…

Together with her new novel "This Mournable Physique", the Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga is taking part this yr for the distinguished Booker Prize, the English equal of the Goncourt Prize. It's a highly effective novel that tells the story of the descent into postcolonial Zimbabwe. The announcement in July of the primary collection of works listed for the prize coincided with the writer accused by the police of getting inspired rebel and…

Since his first novel, published two decades ago, the Algerian Boualem Sansal has built from book to book a work of radical disagreement. Anger and creativity are the hallmarks of this fiction, which realistically testifies to the social, political, religious and economic drive of modern Algeria. In his new novel entitled Abraham or the Fifth Covenant, which just came out this fall, Sansal rewrites the Bible with its plot in the modern…

Author of a corpus of thirty books in which fiction co-exists with poetry and essays, the Congolese Alain Mabanckou is also a professor of literature in California. In the fall, the author publishes "Rumors of America," a collection of essays, halfway between sociological reflections and journalistic chronicles that tell American life and its turbulences. “I came to literature from excessive loneliness and lived in Africa as the only child who carried amazement in his dreams. And then there was this kind of fear of…

The new book from the pen by Mauritian novelist Ananda Devi is not a novel, but an original written exercise published in co-edition with the Musée des Confluences in Lyon. Inspired by the author's encounter with the mummy of a Peruvian, pre - Columbian woman who lived three thousand years ago, Fardo is a text halfway between anthropology, history and reflection on art and writing. The original in its form nonetheless revives this book the haunted themes of Ananda Devi's work, ranging from the state of women to social…

"I got to break and get into theater writers." Author and director Souleymane Bah, 46, will receive the RFI Theater 2020 award for La Cargaison on Sunday 27 September at the Festival des Francophonies, Les Zébrures d'Automne, in Limoges. The text from the Guinean author, exiled in France for four years, invites us to a "macabre stroll" populated by ruined destinies, stranded somewhere. Relaxed and determined at the same time, equipped with an easy opportunity to choose words and speech, during our meeting with the winner,…