Boubacar Boris Diop

Boubacar Boris Diop is a Senegalese novelist, journalist, and playwright born in 1946 in Dakar. He is one of the most important Francophone African writers of his generation and a tireless cultural advocate for African languages, particularly Wolof. He has made the politically significant decision to write fiction in Wolof as well as French. Diop is the author of numerous novels in French, including Le Temps de Tamango (1981), Les Tambours de la mémoire (1990), Le Cavalier et son ombre (1997), and his most internationally celebrated work, Murambi, le livre des ossements (Murambi: The Book of Bones, 2000), written after his participation in the Rwanda Writing Project, a collective of African writers who traveled to Rwanda in 1998 to witness the aftermath of the genocide and write about it. Murambi is considered one of the most important literary testimonies to the Rwandan genocide. Diop has also written Doomi Golo (2003) in Wolof, a landmark work in the history of modern African literature. He received the Neustadt Prize in 2022. He is a deeply committed cultural and political intellectual, consistently arguing for the importance of African languages in African literary and cultural life.