David Diop

Diop was born in Paris to a French mother and Senegalese father, raised in Dakar, and became a professor of eighteenth-century French literature at the University of Pau, specializing in European representations of Africa, the scholarly mirror of his fiction's project.

Frère d'âme (2018) began with the wartime letters of French soldiers and the silence of his own Senegalese great-grandfather, who never spoke of the trenches: Diop set out to voice what the tirailleurs could not write home. It won the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, and Anna Moschovakis's translation, At Night All Blood Is Black, took the 2021 International Booker, shared between author and translator.

Beyond the Door of No Return (2021) followed a French botanist through 1750s Senegal, scholarship and fiction finally converging.