On November 21st at 2:00pm EST, Scholastique Mukasonga joins Barnard professor Kaiama L. Glover at Albertine to discuss her latest novel, Igifu. This event is free and will be in French. You can find the zoom link here.

Scholastique Mukasonga, born in Rwanda in 1956, experienced from childhood the violence and humiliation of the ethnic conflicts that shook her country. She settled in France in 1992, only 2 years before the brutal genocide of the Tutsi swept through Rwanda. In the aftermath, she learned that 37 of her family members had been massacred. Her autobiographical account Cockroaches (Inyenzi ou les Cafards) marked Mukasonga’s entry into literature. This was followed by the publication of The Barefoot Woman (La Femme aux pieds nus) and Igifu (L’Iguifou), both widely praised. Her first novel, Our Lady Of The Nile (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 and the French Voices Award in 2014. In 2019, The Barefoot Woman was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature.

Kaiama L. Glover received a B.A. in French History and Literature and Afro-American Studies from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in French and Romance Philology from Columbia University. She is now an associate professor of French at Barnard College. Her book, Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, explores the Haitian Spiralist movement. She sits on the editorial boards of the Romanic Review and Small Axe and regularly contributes to The New York Times Book Review.