Dany Laferrière
Dany Laferrière (born April 13, 1953, Port-au-Prince, Haiti) is a Haitian-born Canadian author known for lyrical works that often address the immigrant experience. His notable novels include Eroshima (1987), An Aroma of Coffee (1991), Dining with the Dictator (1992), and The Return (2009).
Laferrière was the son of a political dissident forced into exile by the regime of Haitian Pres. François Duvalier, and as a child he was sent to live with his maternal grandmother in the seaside village of Petit-Goâve. In 1964 he returned to Port-au-Prince and completed his secondary studies at the Collège Canado-Haïtien. Afterward he began a career as a journalist and radio broadcaster. However, with the succession of Jean-Claude Duvalier as president, his situation became precarious, and in 1976, after the assassination of a colleague, Laferrière immigrated to Canada and settled in Montreal. He later lived for an extended period in the United States before dividing his time between Montreal and Haiti.
Laferrière emerged as a compelling and provocative writer with the publication in 1985 of his debut novel, Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer (How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired), a semiautobiographical account of the immigrant experience that confronts the realities of displacement and assimilation. His reputation as a novelist was further enhanced with Éroshima (1987; Eroshima), followed by L’Odeur du café (1991; An Aroma of Coffee) and Le Goût des jeunes filles (1992; Dining with the Dictator), which together earned widespread praise for the lyrical quality of his narrative voice and for his thematic exploration of racial and sexual tension, exclusion and alienation, class consciousness, and the multiplicity of exploitation.
Later works that solidified Laferrière’s importance as a French-language author included Chronique de la dérive douce (1994; A Drifting Year), a fictional recollection of the hardships encountered in his early years as an émigré; Vers le sud (2006; Heading South, 2009), a series of vignettes set in Haiti during the regime of Jean-Claude Duvalier; and the highly acclaimed L’Énigme du retour (2009; The Return; also translated as The Enigma of the Return), which was awarded the Prix Médicis in France. Laferrière referred to himself as a Québécois, rather than a “francophone,” writer; he advocated for artistic vision without preconceived boundaries and proclaimed it the writer’s responsibility to “invent his own language.”
Laferrière’s other works include Tout bouge autour de moi (2011; The World Is Moving Around Me), a memoir of the 2010 Haiti earthquake; L’Art Presque perdu de ne rien faire (2014; “The Almost Forgotten Art of Doing Nothing”), a collection of essays; and the graphic novel Sur la route avec Bashō (2021; “On the Road with Bashō), which draws on the traditions of the great Japanese haiku poet Bashō and the Beat generation writer Jack Kerouac. The latter work was illustrated by Laferrière, who has published several other illustrated books and has exhibited his drawings internationally.
In 2015 Laferrière became one of the few non-French citizens inducted into the Académie Française, having been elected by the preeminent 40-member literary institution in 2013 to fill the seat once held by such notable predecessors as Montesquieu and Alexandre Dumas fils.