2022 – Boubacar Boris Diop

Winner of the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature

Award-winning Senegalese author Boubacar Boris Diop (b. 1946) is one of today’s most prominent African novelists, playwrights, and essayists. As the winner of the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the jury commended his most celebrated novel, Murambi: The Book of Bones (2006), which was inspired by Diop’s stay in Rwanda in 1998 after the genocide against the Tutsi and originally published in French in 2000. Diop has also won the Senegalese Republic Grand Prize (1990) for Les Tambours de la mémoire and the Prix Tropiques (1997) for Le Cavalier et son ombre. His two most recent novels, Malaanum lëndëm (2022) and Bàmmeelu Kocc Barma (2017), written in Wolof, were published by EJO Editions, a publishing house specializing in literature written in Senegalese national languages, which Diop founded in 2016. Diop has also created Céytu, a literary collection that aims to publish literary masterpieces from all languages and all cultures into Wolof; Paris’s Editions Zulma released the first series of translated works by such authors as Mariama Bâ, Aimé Césaire, and J. M. G. Le Clézio in 2016. Diop himself translated Aimé Césaire’s Une saison au Congo into Wolof. In addition to EJO Editions, Diop founded Lu defu waxu, the first and only online weekly newspaper in Wolof. Nominated by Jennifer Croft / Representative text: Murambi: The Book of Bones (translated by Fiona McLaughlin)