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Sylvie Kande
Photo: Sylvain Durand
Sylvie Kandé
Senegal
Sylvie (born 1957) is an award-winning poet and scholar. She is the author of three collections of poetry published by Gallimard. Trained as both a literary critic and a historian, she is also known for her work on the complex conversations that have taken place between Africa and Europe and Africa and its Diasporas. Her areas of specialization include métissage/hybridity and post-racial utopias. Her various essays, at the crossroad between history and literature, include "Africa and the European Renaissance”, published in 2004 in the Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature.
(source: www.sylviekande.com)
What you can't miss:
Sylvie Kandé's neo-epic in three cantos is a double narrative combining today's tales of African migration to Europe on the one hand, with the legend of Abubakar II on the other: Abubakar, emperor of 14th-Century Mali, sailed West toward the new world, never to return. Kandé's language deftly weaves a dialogue between these two narratives and between the epic traditions of the globe. Kandé makes of the migrant a new hero, a future hero whose destiny has not yet taken shape, whose stories are still waiting to be told in their fullness and grandeur: the neverending quest has only just begun.
Review: Brittle Paper
Excerpt: Brittle Paper
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