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 François Duvalier, and as a child he was sent to live with his maternal grandmother in the Haitian 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, 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 his native 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), a semiautobiographical account of the immigrant experience that confronts the realities of displacement and assimilation. His reputation was further enhanced with the appearance of the novel 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.”

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.