Alain Mabanckou

Who is Alain Mabanckou?

Alain Mabanckou is a novelist, poet, and academic born on February 24, 1966, in Congo-Brazzaville, and raised in the coastal city of Pointe-Noire. He earned his baccalaureate at the Lycée Karl Marx before taking preliminary law classes at Marien Ngouabi University in Brazzaville. At twenty-two he received a scholarship to study in France, where he completed a postgraduate diploma in law at the Université Paris-Dauphine and worked for about a decade for the Suez-Lyonnaise des Eaux group before turning fully to writing. Mabanckou became one of the most celebrated Francophone African novelists of his generation, known for works depicting the experience of contemporary Africa and the African diaspora in France, including "Broken Glass" (2005) and "Memoirs of a Porcupine" (2006), which won the prestigious Prix Renaudot. In 2002 he became writer-in-residence in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and in 2006 was hired as a professor of literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he continues to teach. In 2016 he was elected to hold an annual chair in artistic creation at the Collège de France in Paris.

Sources: Alain Mabanckou — Wikipedia · Collège de France, Biography and publications — Alain Mabanckou · UCLA European Languages & Transcultural Studies, faculty profile