On September 28, Scholastique Mukasonga will join Laure Alder for the first of a series of virtual lectures on contemporary writing in French hosted by La Maison Française of New York University. The event will be free to attend, but registration is required.

Registration information and other event details to come.

Born in Rwanda in 1956, Scholastique Mukasonga experienced from childhood the violence and humiliation of the ethnic conflicts that shook her country. In the aftermath of the brutal genocide of the Tutsi, Mukasonga learned that 37 of her family members had been massacred. Her first novel published by Archipelago Books, Our Lady of the Nile, was adapted into a film by Atiq Rahimi in 2019. The New York Times named her memoir Cockroaches one of the “50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years.” In 2019, The Barefoot Woman was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translation.

Mukasonga will be in conversation with French journalist, essayist, historian Laure Adler. Adler has published over 30 books, among them being the biographies on Marguerite Dura and Françoise Giroux. She is also former director of the France Culture radio station.

The conversation will be in French.

La Maison Française of New York University has served as a major forum for French-American cultural and intellectual exchange, offering contemporary perspectives on myriad French and Francophone issues. Its rich program of lectures, symposia, concerts, screenings, exhibitions, and special events provides an invaluable resource to the university community, as well as the general public. This event has been made possible through the generous support of the Florence Gould Foundation. For more information contact maison.francaise@nyu.edu.

Scholastique Mukasonga’s collection of stories, Igifu, will be published on September 15.