Awards

• Short-listed for ALTA National Translation Award 2023

Overview

One of The Observer’s fiction picks for 2022 and winner of a PEN Heim award. To deter me, my uncle spoke to me about roots. A line of argument that I found absurd. Even plants are intelligent enough to grow around stones, seeking the best soil for their roots underground. Jeanphi, a young man from the fictional West African city Ouabany, has one obsession that will determine the fate of his life – migration. He scrapes together money to take the illegal route across the Sahara, making it as far as Morocco before being repatriated. Increasingly desperate, Jeanphi meets an elegant French widower who for his part is despairing at the insurmountable bureaucratic hurdles for his charitable endeavour in Jeanphi’s country. A window opens to opportunity – but it will also bring tragedy. Burkinabé author Monique Ilboudo’s novel offers a compelling and complex portrait of migration, one of the defining global concerns of the twenty-first century, and a sharp critique of both the NGO-isation of African countries and the currents of shame that divide communities and families. Yarri Kamara has rendered Ilboudo’s text in an idiom that conveys the sharp humour, lucid descriptions and urgency of the original.

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9781911284802

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"Monique Ilboudo is a Burkinabe writer, activist and academic whose work focuses on the promotion of women's rights and citizenship. She is a regular newspaper contributor, known in particular for her column ""Féminin pluriel"" (1992-1995) which addressed the situation of women in her country. Her first novel, 'Le Mal de Peau' (1992) won a national prize in Burkina Faso. She has also held political office as both a minister and ambassador. Yarri is a writer and a translator of French and Italian with feet in several cultures and a love for building bridges. She entered the field of literary translation after years of activism for diversity in the arts. As a non-fiction writer, she has published in 'Africa is a Country, African Arguments, Courrier International, Lolwe and Welt-Sichten'. She was a fellow of the inaugural Goethe Institut Young African Writers Residency in 2021 and is working on a collection of essays and poems. Of Sierra Leonean and Ugandan origin, Yarri currently lives in Burkina Faso. She studied French Language and Literature at the University of Virginia in the US and holds a master’s degree from Sciences Po Paris. She is the translator of Monique Ilboudo’s 'So Distant from My Life'."

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