‘Alain Mabanckou’

The Times considers him as 'One of Africa's liveliest and most original voices' and The Economist calls him 'Africa's Samuel Beckett', who manages to combine the real French elegance with the Parisian accent and a Congolese rhythm. The writer and poet Alain Mabanckou is the perfect spokesperson of a new generation of African writers.
Mabanckou feels that African literature deserves more recognition. This was the theme of his inaugural lecture in 2016 at the Collège de France, which had more than one thousand listeners jostling for a space in the auditorium. Encouraged by this success, Alain Mabanckou called on researchers, writers and thinkers in post-colonial Africa, inviting them to join him in a discussion on the theme of “Thinking and Writing About Modern-Day Africa”, the title of a book of essays he wrote on the subject. At BOZAR he will discuss with Justine Feyereisen (ULB) the relevance of this literature.
Alain Mabanckou has already received several prestigious awards. He grew up in Pointe-Noire, Congo’s economic capital and has written ten novels including Broken Glass (2005), Memoires of a Porcupine (Renaudot Prize 2006) and Black Moses (2015). He currently lives in Los Angeles where he lectures in literature at UCLA.