Gaël Faye

Gaël Faye is a Franco-Rwandan novelist, rapper, and singer-songwriter born in 1982 in Bujumbura, Burundi, to a French father and a Rwandan mother. He fled Burundi during the civil war in 1995 and settled in France, where he built a career in music before turning to fiction. His music is known for its lyrical engagement with memory, displacement, and identity. His debut novel Petit Pays (Small Country, 2016) was a sensation: a semi-autobiographical story of a mixed-race boy coming of age in Burundi on the eve of the Rwandan genocide. The novel sold more than a million copies in France, won the Prix Goncourt des lycéens, and was adapted into a film. It is one of the most widely read French novels of the past decade. Jacaranda, his second novel and 2024 Prix Renaudot winner, returns to Rwanda and to the legacy of the 1994 genocide, following a young man who returns to the country of his mother's birth to confront the past. The novel was praised for its emotional depth and its handling of the impossible difficulty of transmission — how the truth of an atrocity is passed between generations. Faye is one of the most important Francophone African voices writing today, and Jacaranda confirmed his status as a major novelist.