This September, Brookline Booksmith and City of Asylum Bookstore are hosting a virtual conversation between Scholastique Mukasonga and novelist Maaza Mengiste, as part of their Transnational Literature Series.

Register for free here.

Igifu, translated from the French by Jordan Stump,  is a collection of Scholastique Mukasonga’s autobiographical stories, which rend a glorious Rwanda from the obliterating force of recent history, conjuring the noble cows of her home or the dew-swollen grass they graze on.

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, Our Lady of the Nile, was adapted into a film by Atiq Rahimi in 2019, and won the 2012 Prix Renaudot Prize. 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.

Maaza Mengiste is the author of the novels, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, selected by the Guardian as one of the 10 best contemporary African books; and The Shadow King, a finalist for the LA Times Books Prize, and one of New York Times’ Notable Books of 2019 and TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2019. She is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Premio il ponte, and fellowships from the Fulbright Scholar Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, and LiteraturHaus Zurich. Her work can be found in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Granta, the Guardian, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and BBC, among other publications.