Camara Laye
During his time at college he wrote The African Child (L'Enfant noir), a novel based loosely on his own childhood. He would later become a writer of many essays and was a foe of the government of Guinea. His novel The Radiance of the King (Le Regard du roi) is considered to be one of his most important works.
He was born Malinke (a Mandé speaking ethnicity) into a caste that traditionally worked as blacksmiths and goldsmiths. His family name is Camara, and following the tradition of his community, it precedes his given name—Laye. His mother was from the village of Tindican, and his immediate childhood surroundings were not predominantly influenced by French culture. He attended both the Koranic and French elementary schools in Kouroussa. At
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Irish-born British writer, university lecturer and prolific and highly professional novelist, Iris Murdoch dealt with everyday ethical or moral issues, sometimes in the light of myths. As a writer, she was a perfectionist who did not allow editors to change her text. Murdoch produced 26 novels in 40 years, the last written while she was suffering from Alzheimer disease.
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Dayo Forster
Dayo Forster was born in Gambia and now lives in Kenya. She has published a short story in Kwani? and was one of 12 African writers selected as a participant at the 2006 Caine Prize Writer’s Workshop. The story produced as a result of the workshop was published in a Caine Prize anthology in July 2006. Her short story in Kwani? led her to write her first novel, which will be published early 2008.
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Ferdinand Oyono
Ferdinand Léopold Oyono was an author from Cameroon whose work is recognized for irony that shows how easily people can be fooled. Beginning in the 1960s, he had a long career of service as a diplomat and as a minister in the government, ultimately serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1992 to 1997 and then as Minister of State for Culture from 1997 to 2007.
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Amadou Hampâté Bâ
Amadou Hampâté Bâ was born to an aristocratic Fula family in Bandiagara, the largest city in Dogon territory and the capital of the precolonial Masina Empire. After his father's death, he was adopted by his mother's second husband, Tidjani Amadou Ali Thiam of the Toucouleur ethnic group. He first attended the Qur'anic school run by Tierno Bokar, a dignitary of the Tijaniyyah brotherhood, then transferred to a French school at Bandiagara, then to one at Djenné. In 1915, he ran away from school and rejoined his mother at Kati, where he resumed his studies.
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In 1921, he turned down entry into the école normale in Gorée. As a punishment, the governor appointed him to Ouagadougou with the role he later described as that of "an essentially precario -
Abdulai Sila
Abdulai Silá (also Silla, Sila; born 1 April 1958 in Catió), is a Guinea-Bissauan engineer, economist, social researcher and writer. He is the author of three novels: Eterna Paixão (1994), A Última Tragédia (1995) and Mistida (1997), the first of which was the first novel published in Guinea-Bissau.
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Cheikh Hamidou Kane
Cheikh Hamidou Kane (born 3 April 1928 in Matam) is a Senegalese writer best known for his prize-winning novel L'Aventure ambiguë (Ambiguous Adventure), about the interactions of western and African cultures. Its hero is a Fulani boy who goes to study in France. There, he loses touch with his Islamic faith and his Senegalese roots.
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Vladimir Lorchenkov
Vladimir Lorchenkov, writer and journalist, was born in Chisinau, Moldova, the son of a Soviet army officer, in 1979. In his childhood he traveled across the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, including Transbaikal, the Arctic, Byelorussia, Ukraine, Hungary, Mongolia. When his family returned to Moldova, he studied journalism and for ten years was in charge of crime coverage at a local newspaper. Lorchenkov is a laureate of the 2003 Debut Prize, one of Russia’s highest honors given to young writers, the Russia Prize in 2008, and was short-listed for the National Bestseller Prize in 2012. Lorchenkov has published a dozen books, and his work has been translated into German, Italian, Norwegian, Finnish, Serbo-Croatian and Finnish. He
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Hari Ziyad
Hari Ziyad is a cultural critic, a screenwriter, the editor-in-chief of RaceBaitr, and the author of BLACK BOY OUT OF TIME. They are a 2021 Lambda Literary Fellow, and their writing has been featured in BuzzFeed, Out, the Guardian, Paste magazine, and the academic journal Critical Ethnic Studies, among other publications. Previously they were the managing editor of the Black Youth Project and a script consultant on the television series David Makes Man. Hari spends their all-too-rare free time trying to get their friends to give the latest generation of R & B starlets a chance and attempting to entertain their always very unbothered pit bull mix, Khione. For more information about the author, visit www.hariziyad.com
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Mariama Bâ
Mariama Bâ (1929 – 1981) was a Senegalese author and feminist, who wrote in French. Born in Dakar, she was raised a Muslim, but at an early age came to criticise what she perceived as inequalities between the sexes resulting from [African] traditions. Raised by her traditional grandparents, she had to struggle even to gain an education, because they did not believe that girls should be taught. Bâ later married a Senegalese member of Parliament, Obèye Diop, but divorced him and was left to care for their nine children.
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Her frustration with the fate of African women—as well as her ultimate acceptance of it—is expressed in her first novel, So Long a Letter. In it she depicts the sorrow and resignation of a woman who must share the mourning for -
Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton emerged as one of America’s most insightful novelists, deftly exposing the tensions between societal expectation and personal desire through her vivid portrayals of upper-class life. Drawing from her deep familiarity with New York’s privileged “aristocracy,” she offered readers a keenly observed and piercingly honest vision of Gilded Age society.
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Her work reached a milestone when she became the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, awarded for The Age of Innocence. This novel highlights the constraining rituals of 1870s New York society and remains a defining portrait of elegance laced with regret.
Wharton’s literary achievements span a wide canvas. The House of Mirth presents a tragic, vividly drawn character s -
Richard Marsh
Richard Marsh was the pseudonym of the English author born Richard Bernard Heldmann. A best-selling and prolific author of the late 19th century and the Edwardian period, Marsh is best known now for his supernatural thriller novel The Beetle, which was published the same year as Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), and was initially even more popular, outselling Dracula six times over. The Beetle remained in print until 1960. Marsh produced nearly 80 volumes of fiction and numerous short stories, in genres including horror, crime, romance and humour. Many of these have been republished recently, beginning with The Beetle in 2004. Marsh's grandson Robert Aickman was a notable writer of short "strange stories".
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Toni Morrison
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist and editor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
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Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. Morrison earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955. In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. Morrison became the first black female editor for fiction a -
Sigrid Undset
Sigrid Undset was a Norwegian novelist whose powerful, psychologically rich works made her one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century. Best known for her medieval sagas Kristin Lavransdatter and The Master of Hestviken, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928 for her vivid portrayals of life in the Middle Ages, written with remarkable historical detail and emotional depth.
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Born in Denmark to Norwegian parents, Undset spent most of her life in Norway. After her father's early death, she had to forgo formal education and worked as a secretary while writing in her spare time. Her debut novel Fru Marta Oulie (1907) shocked readers with its opening confession of adultery and established her bold, realist style. -
Philip K. Dick
Philip Kindred Dick was a prolific American science fiction author whose work has had a lasting impact on literature, cinema, and popular culture. Known for his imaginative narratives and profound philosophical themes, Dick explored the nature of reality, the boundaries of human identity, and the impact of technology and authoritarianism on society. His stories often blurred the line between the real and the artificial, challenging readers to question their perceptions and beliefs.
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Raised in California, Dick began writing professionally in the early 1950s, publishing short stories in various science fiction magazines. He quickly developed a distinctive voice within the genre, marked by a fusion of science fiction concepts with deep existenti -
Iris Murdoch
Dame Jean Iris Murdoch
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Irish-born British writer, university lecturer and prolific and highly professional novelist, Iris Murdoch dealt with everyday ethical or moral issues, sometimes in the light of myths. As a writer, she was a perfectionist who did not allow editors to change her text. Murdoch produced 26 novels in 40 years, the last written while she was suffering from Alzheimer disease.
"She wanted, through her novels, to reach all possible readers, in different ways and by different means: by the excitement of her story, its pace and its comedy, through its ideas and its philosophical implications, through the numinous atmosphere of her own original and created world--the world she must have glimpsed as she considered and planned her -
Machado de Assis
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Machado's works had a great influence on Brazilian literary schools of the late 19th century and 20th century. José Saramago, Carlos Fuentes, Susan Sontag and Harold Bloom are among his admirers and Bloom calls him "the supreme black literary artist to date." -
Walter Rodney
In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed twentieth-century Jamaica’s most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People’s Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney was assassinated.
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Manuel Puig
Manuel Puig (born Juan Manuel Puig Delledonne) was an Argentinian author. Among his best known novels are La traición de Rita Hayworth (1968) (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth), Boquitas pintadas (1969) (Heartbreak Tango), and El beso de la mujer araña (1976) (Kiss of the Spider Woman), which was made into a film by the Argentine-Brazilian Director, Héctor Babenco and in 1993 into a Broadway musical.
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Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor (née Coles) was a popular English novelist and short story writer. Elizabeth Coles was born in Reading, Berkshire in 1912. She was educated at The Abbey School, Reading, and worked as a governess, as a tutor and as a librarian.
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In 1936, she married John William Kendall Taylor, a businessman. She lived in Penn, Buckinghamshire, for almost all her married life.
Her first novel, At Mrs. Lippincote's, was published in 1945 and was followed by eleven more. Her short stories were published in various magazines and collected in four volumes. She also wrote a children's book.
Taylor's work is mainly concerned with the nuances of "everyday" life and situations, which she writes about with dexterity. Her shrewd but affectionate portraya -
Stella Gibbons
Stella Dorothea Gibbons was an English novelist, journalist, poet and short-story writer.
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Her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm, won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1933. A satire and parody of the pessimistic ruralism of Thomas Hardy, his followers and especially Precious Bain by Mary Webb -the "loam and lovechild" genre, as some called it, Cold Comfort Farm introduces a self-confident young woman, quite self-consciously modern, pragmatic and optimistic, into the grim, fate-bound and dark rural scene those novelists tended to portray. -
Ahmadou Kourouma
Ahmadou Kourouma, (November 24, 1927 – December 11, 2003) was an Ivorian novelist.
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The eldest son of a distinguished Malinké family, Ahmadou Kourouma was born in 1927 in Côte d'Ivoire. Raised by his uncle, he initially pursued studies in Bamako, Mali. From 1950 to 1954, when his country was still under French colonial control, he participated in French military campaigns in Indochina, after which he journeyed to France to study mathematics in Lyon.
Kourouma returned to his native Côte d'Ivoire after it won its independence in 1960, yet he quickly found himself questioning the government of Félix Houphouët-Boigny. After brief imprisonment, Kourouma spent several years in exile, first in Algeria (1964-1969), then in Cameroon (1974-1984) and Tog -
László Krasznahorkai
László Krasznahorkai is a Hungarian novelist and screenwriter who is known for critically difficult and demanding novels, often labelled as postmodern, with dystopian and bleak melancholic themes. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2025.
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He is probably best known through the oeuvre of the director Béla Tarr, who has collaborated with him on several movies.
Apart from the Nobel Prize, Krasznahorkai has also been honored with numerous literary prizes, among them the highest award of the Hungarian state, the Kossuth Prize, and the 2015 Man Booker International Prize for his English-translated oeuvre. -
Ousmane Sembène
Ousmane Sembène often credited in the French style as Sembène Ousmane in articles and reference works, was a Senegalese film director, producer and writer. The Los Angeles Times considered him one of the greatest authors of Africa and has often been called the "Father of African film."
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Ferdinand Oyono
Ferdinand Léopold Oyono was an author from Cameroon whose work is recognized for irony that shows how easily people can be fooled. Beginning in the 1960s, he had a long career of service as a diplomat and as a minister in the government, ultimately serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1992 to 1997 and then as Minister of State for Culture from 1997 to 2007.
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Oyono's novels were written in French in the late 1950s and were only translated into English a decade or two afterward. -
Djibril Tamsir Niane
Djibril Tamsir Niane (born 9 January 1932) is a historian, playwright, and short story writer, born in Conakry, Guinea.
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His secondary education was in Senegal and his degree from the University of Bordeaux. He is an honorary professor of Howard University and the University of Tokyo. He is noted for introducing the Epic of Sundiata, about Sundiata Keita (ca 1217-1255), founder of the Mali Empire, to the Western world in 1960 by translating the story told to him by Djeli Mamoudou Kouyate, a griot or traditional oral historian. He also edited Volume IV —Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century— of the UNESCO General History of Africa and did other UNESCO projects. He was the father of model Katoucha Niane, (1960–2008).
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Mariama Bâ
Mariama Bâ (1929 – 1981) was a Senegalese author and feminist, who wrote in French. Born in Dakar, she was raised a Muslim, but at an early age came to criticise what she perceived as inequalities between the sexes resulting from [African] traditions. Raised by her traditional grandparents, she had to struggle even to gain an education, because they did not believe that girls should be taught. Bâ later married a Senegalese member of Parliament, Obèye Diop, but divorced him and was left to care for their nine children.
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Her frustration with the fate of African women—as well as her ultimate acceptance of it—is expressed in her first novel, So Long a Letter. In it she depicts the sorrow and resignation of a woman who must share the mourning for -
Faïza Guène
Faïza Guène is a French writer and director. Born to parents of Algerian origin, she grew up in Pantin, in the north-eastern suburbs of Paris. She attended Collège Jean Jaurès followed by Lycée Marcelin Berthelot in Pantin. She began studies in sociology at Université Paris VIII, in St-Denis, before abandoning them to pursue writing and directing full-time.
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Her first novel, "Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow" was published in 2004 when Guène was nineteen years old. The novel has sold over 200,000 copies and been translated into twenty-two different languages, and paved the way for her following work, "Some Dream for Fools" (2006) and "Les gens du Balto" (2008).
Guène has also written for "Respect" magazine since 2005 and directed several short films, incl -
H. Rider Haggard
Sir Henry Rider Haggard, KBE was an English writer of adventure novels set in exotic locations, predominantly Africa, and the creator of the Lost World literary genre. His stories, situated at the lighter end of the scale of Victorian literature, continue to be popular and influential. He was also involved in agricultural reform and improvement in the British Empire.
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His breakout novel was King Solomon's Mines (1885), which was to be the first in a series telling of the multitudinous adventures of its protagonist, Allan Quatermain.
Haggard was made a Knight Bachelor in 1912 and a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1919. He stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as a Conservative candidate for the Eastern division of Norf -
Naguib Mahfouz
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Fiston Mwanza Mujila
Fiston Nasser Mwanza Mujila is a Congolese writer.. He now lives in Graz, Austria and is pursuing a PhD in Romance Languages. His writing has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Gold Medal at the 6th Jeux de la Francophonie in Beirut as well as the Best Text for Theater (State Theater, Mainz) in 2010. His poems, prose works, and plays are reactions to the political turbulence that has come in the wake of the independence of the Congo and its effect on day-to-day life. His debut novel Tram 83 was a French Voices 2014 grant recipient and won the Grand Prix du Premier Roman des SGDL, and was shortlisted for numerous other awards, including the Prix du Monde. Tram 83 has drawn comparisons to Fitzgerald, Céline, García Márquez, Hunter S.
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Don Martin
Writes books on Business and Finance, usually with his wife, Renee Martin.
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Atia Abawi
Atia Abawi is a foreign correspondent and author based in the Middle East.
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From an early age, Atia knew she wanted to be a journalist. After graduating from Virginia Tech, where she anchored the college’s local television station VTTV, Atia volunteered and was then hired on at CTV 76 –a local TV station in Largo, MD. In Maryland, Atia covered a wide range of stories – from politics to the impact that drugs and crime had on the local community - before moving to Atlanta to work for CNN.
At CNN, she started in the Media Operations department before making her way to the international desk. Within 2-years Atia was out in the field, producing on stories that included Benazir Bhutto’s assassination in Pakistan and the war in Iraq. A year-later she -
Qiu Miaojin
Qiu Miaojin (1969–1995) was one of Taiwan’s most innovative literary modernists, and the country’s most renowned lesbian writer. Her first published story, “Prisoner,” received the Central Daily News Short Story Prize, and her novella Lonely Crowds won the United Literature Association Award. While attending graduate school in Paris, she directed a thirty-minute film called Ghost Carnival, and not long after this, at the age of twenty-six, she committed suicide. The posthumous publications of her novels Last Words from Montmartre and Notes of a Crocodile (forthcoming from NYRB Classics) made her into one of the most revered countercultural icons in Chinese letters.
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NYRB Classics newsletter - 5/21-20114
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Abdulai Sila
Abdulai Silá (also Silla, Sila; born 1 April 1958 in Catió), is a Guinea-Bissauan engineer, economist, social researcher and writer. He is the author of three novels: Eterna Paixão (1994), A Última Tragédia (1995) and Mistida (1997), the first of which was the first novel published in Guinea-Bissau.
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Cheikh Hamidou Kane
Cheikh Hamidou Kane (born 3 April 1928 in Matam) is a Senegalese writer best known for his prize-winning novel L'Aventure ambiguë (Ambiguous Adventure), about the interactions of western and African cultures. Its hero is a Fulani boy who goes to study in France. There, he loses touch with his Islamic faith and his Senegalese roots.
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(from Wikipedia) -
Ousmane Sembène
Ousmane Sembène often credited in the French style as Sembène Ousmane in articles and reference works, was a Senegalese film director, producer and writer. The Los Angeles Times considered him one of the greatest authors of Africa and has often been called the "Father of African film."
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Aida Edemariam
Aida Edemariam, whose father is Ethiopian and mother Canadian, grew up in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She studied English literature at Oxford and the University of Toronto, and has worked as a journalist in New York (at Harper’s Magazine), Toronto and London, where she is a senior feature writer and editor for the Guardian, writing on everything from politics to literature (essays on the academic novel, interviews with Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Edward Albee, Jorie Graham, Hilary Mantel etc) to reporting on the aircraft and North Sea oil industries. Her work has been chosen for Best American Essays, and nominated for a National Magazine Award and an Amnesty Media award. An early section of her first book was awarded a Royal Society of Literatu
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Djibril Tamsir Niane
Djibril Tamsir Niane (born 9 January 1932) is a historian, playwright, and short story writer, born in Conakry, Guinea.
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His secondary education was in Senegal and his degree from the University of Bordeaux. He is an honorary professor of Howard University and the University of Tokyo. He is noted for introducing the Epic of Sundiata, about Sundiata Keita (ca 1217-1255), founder of the Mali Empire, to the Western world in 1960 by translating the story told to him by Djeli Mamoudou Kouyate, a griot or traditional oral historian. He also edited Volume IV —Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century— of the UNESCO General History of Africa and did other UNESCO projects. He was the father of model Katoucha Niane, (1960–2008).
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Ahmadou Kourouma
Ahmadou Kourouma, (November 24, 1927 – December 11, 2003) was an Ivorian novelist.
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The eldest son of a distinguished Malinké family, Ahmadou Kourouma was born in 1927 in Côte d'Ivoire. Raised by his uncle, he initially pursued studies in Bamako, Mali. From 1950 to 1954, when his country was still under French colonial control, he participated in French military campaigns in Indochina, after which he journeyed to France to study mathematics in Lyon.
Kourouma returned to his native Côte d'Ivoire after it won its independence in 1960, yet he quickly found himself questioning the government of Félix Houphouët-Boigny. After brief imprisonment, Kourouma spent several years in exile, first in Algeria (1964-1969), then in Cameroon (1974-1984) and Tog -
Thomas Mofolo
Thomas Mokopu Mofolo (22 December 1876 – 8 September 1948) is considered to be the greatest Basotho author. He wrote mostly in the Sesotho language, but his most popular book, Chaka, has been translated into English and other languages.
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Outhine Bounyavong
Outhine Bounyavong (Lao: ອຸທິນ ບຸນຍາວົງ ʻUthin Bunyāvong) was a Laotian writer, known especially for works of contemporary fiction.
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Born in 1942 in Xaignabouli Province, he grew up in the capital, Vientiane, where one of his early teachers was Somchine Nginn, author of the first novel in Lao.
Outhine held a variety of jobs during the 1960s, and began to publish short fictional works in newspapers and magazines. He came to be associated with the group of writers who were the children of Maha Sila Viravong, an important Laotian scholar. Eventually he married one of this group, Duangdeuane Viravong, a prominent author in her own right.
Outhine worked during the Laotian Civil War and, after the Communist victory in 1975, continued to write for the -
René Maran
René Maran, né à Fort-de-France (Martinique), le 5 novembre 1887, mort à Paris 13e le 9 mai 1960, est un écrivain français, lauréat du prix Goncourt en 1921 pour son roman Batouala, dont la préface dénonce le colonialisme.
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