Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr is a Senegalese novelist born in 1990 in Diourbel. He studied literature in Dakar and Paris, where he obtained a master's degree from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. He is the youngest writer ever to win the Prix Goncourt and the first sub-Saharan African author to do so. His debut novel Silence du choeur (2017) was praised for its examination of the migrant crisis in Sicily. His third novel, La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (The Most Secret Memory of Men), won both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix du roman Métis in 2021. It is a formally ambitious, multilayered work about a Senegalese writer's obsession with a mysterious African novelist who published one devastating novel in Paris in 1938 and then disappeared. The novel is explicitly in dialogue with Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives and engages with questions of African literary history, colonial ghosts, and the meaning of literary greatness. It draws on the real history of Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem, whose novel Bound to Violence (1968) was accused of plagiarism and subsequently suppressed. Sarr is widely regarded as one of the most significant voices in contemporary Francophone African literature and a writer of exceptional ambition and literary intelligence.