Diversity of voices, diversity of languages : one week of events and readings in Lyon and in the Rhône-Alpes region.
Léonora Miano
© J.F. Paga / Grasset
WRITER
Cameroon - France
Léonora Miano was born in Douala, Cameroon in 1973. She spent her childhood and adolescence in this village then left for France in 1991. After studying Literature, Languages and Foreign Civilizations, she specialized in literature of the Americas and the Commonwealth.
Raised by avid readers (her mother was an English professor and her father a pharmacist), Miano had accesss to her parents large library and developed a taste for literature at a very early age.
Her discovery of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal by Aimé Césaire when she was twelve, and of La prochaine fois, le feu by James Baldwin two years later, pushed her into what she calls the Afro-diasporic cauldron. Since then, she has searched for texts by Afrodescendent authors. Surprisingly absent from the abundant family library, these authors seemed like a hidden, almost forbidden land to her. Their words seemed to both transgress and offer tools for self-understanding.
Her work, comprising seven novels, two collections of short texts and a theatrical text, aims to re-situate the Subsaharan and Afrodescendant peoples in the globality of human experience. Through characters whose individuality she wants to be obvious, the author examines the impact of history on individual stories. Everyone can identify with the characters’ intimate suffering and take on their voices.
Among Miano’s many distinctions, she received the 2012 Seligmann Foundation Prize Against Racism for Écrits pour la parole, and the 2012 literary grand prix of Subsaharan Africa for her complete works.
