David Diop

Senegal & France (b. 1966 )

Writes in French

David Diop is a French-Senegalese novelist and academic. He currently teaches at the University of Pau, where he specializes in 18th-century French literature and literary history, and especially representations of Africa in travel writing and abolitionist texts. Born in Paris to a French mother and Senegalese father, Diop spent most of his childhood in Dakar before returning to France to study. His first book 1889, l’Attraction universelle (2012) details the experiences of members of a Senegalese delegation to the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889. His second novel Frère d’âme (2018) is narrated from the perspective of a Senegalese tirailleurs fighting for the French in the trenches of World War I. It received the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, among other prises, and the English translation by Anna Moschovakis, At Night All Blood Is Black (2020), received the International Booker Prize in 2021. His most recent novel, La Porte du voyage sans retour (2021) revisits the history of the Atlantic slave trade through the perspective of a French botanist who travels to Senegal and falls in love with an enslaved woman.