‘A powerful work of witness and memorial’ – Zadie Smith

Celebrating a new partnership between ILFDublin and the Centre for Resistance Studies in Trinity College Dublin, Scholastique Mukasonga illustrates the power of the memoir to recover individual stories out of the tragedy of national history.

In her new book, The Barefoot Woman, Mukasonga recovers her lost family’s story out of the Rwandan genocide, offering it to her readers with an extraordinary tenderness. Memories of exile, violence, death, and displacement are part of a song of the human spirit, and of the inherent drive to endure, to survive, and to remember. Her memoir charts a recovery out of trauma of a family’s personal and precious reality.

Born in Rwanda in 1956, Scholastique Mukasonga settled in France in 1992, a mere two years before the genocide of the Tutsi tore through her birthplace. She was awarded the Ahamadou Kourouma, the Renaudot, and the Océans France Ô Prizes, as well as the French Voices Award for her first novel, Our Lady of the Nile. Scholastique is also a short story writer.

The event will be chaired by Théophile Munyangeyo, Assistant Professor in Francophone African Studies at Trinity College Dublin.

Presented in association with The Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute and with the Embassy of France in Ireland.