On Tuesday, September 23, please join us to celebrate the release of Our Lady of the Nile, Scholastique Mukasonga’s award-winning debut novel, translated from the French by Melanie Mauthner and published in English for the first time by Archipelago Books. 

Co-hosted by the French Publishers’ Agency, the evening will feature a conversation with Scholastique Mukasonga and Bhakti Shringarpure.

This event is free and open to the public; refreshments will be served.

Born in Rwanda in 1956, Scholastique Mukasonga experienced from childhood the violence and humiliation of the ethnic conflicts that shook her country. In 1960, her family was displaced to the polluted and under-developed Bugesera district of Rwanda. Mukasonga was later forced to leave the school of social assistance in Butare and flee to Burundi. She settled in France in 1992, only 2 years before the brutal genocide of the Tutsi swept through Rwanda. In the aftermath, Mukasonga learned that 27 of her family members had been massacred. Twelve years later, Gallimard published her autobiographical account Inyenzi ou les Cafards, which marked Mukasonga’s entry into literature. This was followed by the publication of La femme aux pieds nus in 2008 and L’Iguifou in 2010, both widely praised. Her first novel, Notre-Dame du Nil, won the Ahamadou Kourouma prize and the Renaudot prize in 2012, as well as the Océans France Ô prize in 2013.

Bhakti Shringarpure is the Co-founder and Editor in Chief of Warscapes magazine. She is a writer, translator and academic who received a BA in Literature from Bard College and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the City University of New York. She is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at University of Connecticut (Storrs). She focuses on literature emerging from civil wars in the aftermath of European colonialism with an emphasis on narratives of nation, violence, gender and the figure of the “other”. Her current research is focused on decolonization and its intersections with the period of the Cold War.