The 2024 edition of the Paris Book Fair has chosen the writer Dany Laferrière as guest of honor
Until May 12, the Pont des Arts and the square of the Institut de France host the exhibition “A nomadic heart”. A journey in texts and drawings through the life of the writer Dany Laferrière.
Academician Dany Laferrière, based in Montreal since 1976, signed there, at the end of 2023, “A certain art of living”, collection of maxims and poetic thoughts. He offers us an intimate and literary postcard from his adopted land.
Dany Laferrière, baptized Windsor Klébert Laferrière in homage to his father born April 13, 1953 in Port-au-Prince in Haiti, is an academician, writer and director residing mainly in Montreal and Paris.
He received the 2009 Medici Prize for his novel The Enigma of the Return. On December 12, 2013, he was elected to the French Academy, where he was officially received on May 28, 2015.
First a journalist in Haiti, Dany Laferrière, 71, now lives in Montreal, Quebec. He also goes very often to Paris, where he sits at the French Academy.
His media interventions were noticed, notably by Télévision Quatre Saisons and Radio-Canada, who hired him. He works there as a columnist and weather presenter on the condition, he says, of being able to speak freely and about everything “except for weather”which led him to be part of La Bande des six, a television show Radio-Canada alongside Marie-France Bazzo, René-Homier Roy, Nathalie Petrowski, Georges-Hébert Germain, and Suzanne Lévesque, where he devotes himself to chronicles « culture » (literature, cinema, painting, music, theater), continuing his writing activity with an autobiographical flavor.
In 1986, after the fall of Jean Claude Duvalier, Dany Laferrière went to Haiti with the writer Jean-Claude Charles, and traveled the country while writing a daily column for Le Nouvelliste on the debacle of the tontons macoutes
In November 2009, he received the Médicis Prize for The Enigma of the Return. On January 17, he was honored “Personality of the year 2009” at the La Presse/Radio-Canada Excellence Gala.
On December 12, 2013, notably against Catherine Clément, Arthur Pauly and Jean-Claude Perrier, he was elected in the first round of voting to the 2nd chair of the French Academy, becoming the first immortal from Haiti and Canada to sit there.
At 10 a.m. that day, he gave a lecture on literature in Port-au-Prince. He wanted to be “in this country where after a terrible colonial war, the then slave-holding France was kicked out while keeping its language” to receive the news of his election.
Received on May 28, 2015 by Amin Maalouf, he delivered his reception speech as tradition dictates, in tribute to his predecessor Hector Bianciotti.
He is the second member of this institution to join without ever having held French nationality after Julien Green in 1971, the first to live outside France, the second Black after Léopold Sédar Senghor (elected in 1983), and the third Black elected member of the Institut de France (Ousmane Sow being elected foreign associate at the Academy of Fine Arts in 2012).
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