Yanick Lahens – författare

The Haiti of Yanick Lahens' path-breaking short fiction is a country demanding our compassion as it reveals to us its horrors. For decades among the forefront of Haitian writers. Lahens has embarked on a renewal of the genre of short stories that she inherited from Caribbean - and especially Haitian - traditions. Through her elliptical and sharp style she succeeds in conveying the authenticity of her people's tragic fight for survival within the scope of our shared human experience. Here is day-to-day life, packed with its myriad emotions, desires, and contradictions, against a backdrop of extraordinary circumstances. The men and women glimpsed in Lahens' stories are confronted with the overwhelming task of simply staying alive. 'The Survivors' unfolds under the Duvalier dictatorship. The story, centered on a group of men who dream of somehow striking out against the regime, shows how fear is passed down from generation to generation. Life is no simpler in the post-Duvalier world of the title story, in which a young man is caught between a mother who lives a devout life filled with self-imposed restrictions and an aunt who religiously serves the spirits of Vodou but makes no apologies for working in the black market. The twelve-year-old girl who narrates 'Madness Had Come with the Rain' finds herself swept up in a violent riot following the death of a modern Robin Hood. Lahens' women, although they may act as the poto mitan (or 'central pole') in family life and society, experience a particularly grim fate. In the eviction tale, 'And All This Unease' a beautiful girl reminisces about her happy childhood in the country in order to forget her current life as a prostitute. Yanick Lahens presents testimonies, opens intimacies, sometimes offers hope, but always returns to the despair afflicting Haiti, because lying within it is the key to her country. The first collection of Lahens' unforgettable short stories available in English, this volume will bring one of the most important voices in contemporary literature to the wider audience it deserves.

Yanick Lahens leads us into a breathless intrigue with her newest portrait of Haiti, Sweet Undoings.In Port-au-Prince, violence never consumes. It finds its counterpart in a "high-pitched sweetness", a sweetness that overwhelms Francis, a French journalist, one evening at the Corossol Restaurant-Bar, when the broken, rich voice of lounge singer Brune rises from the microphone.Brune's father, Judge Berthier, was assassinated, guilty of maintaining integrity in a city where everything is bought. Six months after this disappearance, Brune wholly refuses to come to terms with what happened. Her uncle Pierre, a gay man who spent his youth abroad to avoid persecution, refuses to give up on solving this unpunished crime.Alongside Brune and Pierre, Francis becomes acquainted with myriad other voices of Port-au-Prince, including Ézèchiel, a poet desperate to escape his miserable neighborhood; Waner, a diligent pacifist; and Ronny the American, at ease in Haiti as in a second homeland. Drawing its power from the bowels of the city, Sweet Undoings moves with a rapid, electric syncopation, gradually and tenderly revealing the richness of the lives within.

A visceral and intense novel of revolutionary change in Haiti, The Colour of Dawn follows the fortunes of the Méracin family, in particular sisters Angelique and Joyeuse and their brother Fignolé, in a poorer part of Port-au-Prince. Set in the course of a single day, duty to the family and desire for a better life clash with a world of gunfire, racketeering and kidnapping, as the apocalyptic surroundings of the Haitian capital begin to take hold.Yanick Lahens constructs an exquisitely poignant human story and testimony to life, capturing with remarkable economy the fate of both an otherwise ordinary family and a country where monstrosity wants to rule. Translated by Alison Layland."Powerful and unforgettable." - Kate Saunders, The Times.Yanick Lahens lives in Haiti. A professor of literature, she dedicates much of her time to a foundation training young Haitians in sustainable development. Her first novel, Dans la maison du père (In the House of the Father), won the LiBeratur Preis at the Leipzig Book Fair in 2002. The Colour of Dawn was first published as La Couleur de l'aube (2008), which won the Prix du Livre RFO and the Prix littéraire Richelieu de la Francophonie in 2009, along with the 2008 Prix Millepages 2008. Alison Layland won the Translators' House Wales/Oxfam Cymru 2010 Translation Challenge with a translation of one of Lahens' short stories.

Winner of the 2014 Prix Fémina & 2015 French Voices AwardAfter she is found washed up on shore, Cétoute Olmène Thérèse, bloody and bruised, recalls the circumstances that led her there. Her voice weaves hauntingly in and out of the narrative, as her story intertwines with those of three generations of women in her family, beginning with Olmène, her grandmother.Olmène, barely sixteen, catches the eye of the cruel and powerful Tertulien Mésidor, despite the generations-long feud between their families which cast her ancestors into poverty. He promises her shoes, dresses, land, and children who will want for nothing…and five months after moving into her new home, she gives birth to a son. As the family struggles through political and economic turmoil, the narrative shifts between the voices of four women, their lives interwoven with magic and fraught equally with hope and despair, leading to Cétoute’s ultimate, tragic fate.Yanick Lahens was born in Port-au-Prince in 1953 and is one of Haiti’s most prominent authors. She published her first novel in 2000, was awarded the prestigious Prix Femina in 2014 for Moonbath, and is the 2016 winner of a French Voices Award.