Léonora Miano

Léonora Miano is a Cameroonian-French novelist born in 1973 in Douala. She moved to France at the age of eighteen to study English literature and has lived there since. Her fiction engages with the history and present of sub-Saharan Africa, Afro-European identity, and the legacy of slavery and colonialism with uncompromising political and literary intelligence. Miano is the author of a substantial body of work including L'Intérieur de la nuit (2005), Contours du jour qui vient (2006, Prix Goncourt des lycéens), and several other novels. She has also published essays on Afropean identity and the politics of culture. La Saison de l'ombre (Season of the Shadow), her 2013 Prix Femina winner, is a historical novel set in a village on the coast of Cameroon in the 18th century, following women who search for their disappeared sons and husbands — taken, it emerges, by the Atlantic slave trade. The novel is a profound and unsettling act of historical imagination. Miano is one of the most significant contemporary Francophone African writers, recognized for the intellectual depth, moral seriousness, and literary ambition of her work.