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David Diop

David Diop
Born	1966 (age 54–55) Paris, France
Nationality	French
Alma mater	Paris-Sorbonne University

David Diop (born February 24, 1966 in Paris ) is a French - Senegalese writer and literary scholar. International fame as a novelist earned him his second, multiple award-winning work, Frère d'âme (2018).

Life of David Diop

Childhood, education and teaching 

The son of a French mother and a Senegalese father was born in Paris, but grew up in Senegal. There he also attended elementary and secondary school. Diop returned to France for further studies. He studied in Toulouse and Paris and received his doctorate from the Sorbonne in 18th century French literature. 

Since 1998 Diop has worked as a lecturer at the University of Pau . There he teaches literature of the 18th century and French-language African literature. Since 2009 Diop has also headed a research group (GRREA 17/18) that deals with the European colonization of Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries. In 2014 he obtained the habilitation à diriger des recherches (HDR), which is considered the central qualification for admission to a professorship in France.

Working as a writer 

In parallel to his teaching activity, Diop has so far published two historical novels. His debut novel 1889, l'attraction universelle , published in 2012, focuses on a Senegalese delegation whose trip to the Paris World's Fair in 1889 ends miserably in a circus in Bordeaux .

Diop's second novel, Frère d'âme (English title: Our blood is black at night ; . "Brothers in Arms"), which was published in 2018 by the renowned publisher Éditions du Seuil . The book to which a. A quote from the Senegalese author Cheikh Hamidou Kane is prefixed, he also called it his "true first novel". The work was inspired by Diop's great-grandfather, who was one of around 135,000 Senegalese "tirailleurs" in World War I.fought on the side of the French troops, but had never spoken of his experiences. 30,000 of them were killed. 

Frère d'âme got the only plant in the final selection of the four major French literary prizes Prix Goncourt , Renaudot , Prix Femina and Prix Médicis and also led the critics' survey of the trade magazine Livres Hebdo by a wide margin on, but became only the Prix Goncourt des lycéens . The book tells the story of the two Senegalese childhood friends Alfa Ndyaye and Mademba Diop from the country, who fought as riflemen on the side of the French troops against German soldiers in the First World War . 

While Mademba in the brutal trench warfare inLorraine dies, Alfa goes mad and, following a cruel ritual, begins to chop off the hands of the defeated German enemy and take them with him as spoils of war. If Alfa is initially celebrated as a hero by his French comrades, he begins to frighten them off with every further act. When writing, 

Diop first concentrated on the character of Alfa, who also functions as the narrator in the book, and lives in a double exile: “He came to an absolutely foreign country and also to a country that did not correspond to what it was should be, that is, instead of feeding the people, a land of death, ”said Diop. 

In the course of the Prix Goncourt occupied Frère d'âme a leading position on the bestseller list in France. Translations into 13 languages ​​are to follow by mid-2021. Diops Roman was awarded other prizes abroad, including the Premio Strega Europeo (2019), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (2020) and the International Booker Prize (2021). Valérie Marin La Meslée ( Le Point ) praised Diop's novel as one of the most beautiful of the literary year and as a “universal fable”. Gladys Marivat ( Le Monde ) drew comparisons to the 2013 Goncourt Prize winner, Au revoir là-haut by Pierre Lemaitre . She praised Frère d'âme as a “wonderful novel about the First World War”, highlighted Diop's filigree language and the ambiguous main character in the tradition of the “comedy of wildness” (“la comédie de la sauvagerie”). Diop himself referred to oral cultureof the soldiers from West Africa and the few written records from this period. That is why it was so important to him to write a novel about these people who had not previously appeared in literature. Deutschlandfunk Kultur interpreted Frère d'âme as not a direct accusation against the colonial power France and referred to the brutality of the war described in the book. The 176-page anti-war novel is "structured like a song, like a litany, a monologue in which the protagonist writes his fear from his soul". 

More than 90 years earlier, Bakary Diallo, an illiterate man from Mali, had published his war memories as a tirailleur sénégalais with outside help. Since then, the history of the Senegalese riflemen has been an occasion for patriotic memories in France rather than for historical or literary reappraisal. 

Works 

Novels

• 1889, l'attraction universelle . L'Harmattan, Paris 2012 - ISBN 9782296962101 .
• Brother d'âme . Éditions du Seuil, Paris 2018 - ISBN 9782021398243 .
• German: At night our blood is black . Translated by Andreas Jandl . Structure, Berlin 2019 - ISBN 978-3-351-03791-8

Awards 

• 2018: Prix ​​Goncourt des lycéens for Frère d'âme
• 2019: Prix Ahmadou Kourouma for Frère d'âme 
• 2019: Premio Strega Europeo for Fratelli d'anima
• 2020: Europese Literatuurprijs für Meer dan een broer 
• 2020: Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction for At Night All Blood is Black
• 2021: International Booker Prize for At Night All Blood is Black (together with translator Anna Moschovakis)