Patrick Chamoiseau

Patrick Chamoiseau was born on December 3, 1953, in Fort-de-France, Martinique, and grew up in the centre of the town, around the rue François-Arago, the world he would later write into his trilogy of childhood memoirs. He studied law and social economics in France and came home to Martinique to work as a social worker, for years an educator with young offenders in Fort-de-France; the national library of France records him as a prison educator as late as 1990. Inspired by Édouard Glissant, twenty-five years his elder and later his friend and co-author, he turned to the Creole culture of the island: its storytellers, its market porters, its spoken memory. He drew cartoons under the name Abel, wrote a history of the Antilles under Napoleon with Georges Puisy in 1981, and in 1986 published his first novel, Chronique des sept misères, about the djobeurs, the wheelbarrow porters of the Fort-de-France market. Solibo Magnifique (1988), the story of a storyteller who dies in mid-performance, followed, and in 1989, with Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant, he signed Éloge de la créolité, the manifesto In Praise of Creoleness, which held that Caribbean identity is mixed and Creole rather than French or African alone. Antan d'enfance (1990), the first of the childhood books, won the Prix Carbet. In 1992 Texaco, the history of a shantytown on the edge of Fort-de-France told by its founder, Marie-Sophie Laborieux, from her enslaved grandparents to the town planner sent to clear it, won the Prix Goncourt. Its English translation, by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov, was a New York Times Notable Book in 1997, and Derek Walcott answered it with an open letter. Later books include L'Esclave vieil homme et le Molosse (1997), essays written with Glissant, the plea for migrants Frères migrants (2017) and Le Vent du nord dans les fougères glacées (2022). He received a Prince Claus Award in 1999 and lives in Martinique.