达尼·拉费里埃

Windsor Klébert Laferrière (born 13 April 1953), known as Dany Laferrière (French pronunciation: [dani lafɛʁjɛʁ]) is a writer, painter and filmmaker. He was elected to seat 2 of the Académie française on 12 December 2013, and inducted in May 2015. Born in Haiti, he lives between Montreal and Paris.

Life

Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and raised in Petit-Goâve, Laferrière worked as a journalist in Haiti before moving to Canada in 1976. He also worked as a columnist in Canada and hosted television programming for the TQS network and Radio-Canada.

Laferrière published his first novel, How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired (Comment faire l'amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer) in 1985. The novel was later adapted into a screenplay by Laferrière and Richard Sadler, earning a Genie Award nomination for best adapted screenplay at the 11th Genie Awards in 1990. The film adaptation of the novel starred Isaach De Bankolé and was directed by Jacques W. Benoit.

His works have been translated and published in more than twenty languages, including German, English (David Homel), Italian, Japanese, Spanish, and Korean. In a playful exploration of literary identity, he gave one of his novels the provocative title I Am a Japanese Writer, dedicating it “to all those who would like to be someone else.” The novel was named the top title of SWR2's 2020 German literary season.

Several further films have been adapted from his work, including On the Verge of a Fever (Le Goût des jeunes filles) in 2004 and Heading South (Vers le sud) in 2005. He also wrote the original screenplays for Voodoo Taxi in 1991 and How to Conquer America in One Night (Comment conquérir l'Amérique en une nuit) in 2004, and was the director of the latter.

In 2009, Laferrière won the prestigious Prix Médicis for his nineteenth book, L'énigme du retour. The novel follows the narrator as he returns to his birthplace in Haiti, 33 years after he left it, upon learning of his father's death in New York City. The narrative blurs the line between prose and poetry, resembling haiku structures in some sections.

On January 12, 2010, at 4:53:10 p.m., Laferrière was in Port-au-Prince as a guest of the Étonnants Voyageurs literary festival when the earthquake struck Haiti. In his black notebook, he recorded his impressions with such immediacy that The World Is Moving Around Me conveys the experience of the disaster as it unfolded. While television broadcasts showed collapsed buildings and the dead, Laferrière chronicled everyday life in a shattered city and the desperate efforts to preserve dignity and humanity. The English-language edition was named the Best Essay of 2013 by the American publication Kirkus Reviews.

December 12, 2013, marked a historic event : Dany Laferrière was elected to the Académie française. Before the vote, the Permanent Secretary consulted the President of the French Republic, regarding a candidate who was neither French nor Parisian, but born in Haiti, a naturalized Canadian, and a resident of Montreal. His candidacy was unprecedented. Laferrière was elected on the first round of balloting to Seat no. 2 of the Académie française, becoming the first Haitian, the first Canadian and the first Quebecer to receive that honour. He is the second black person to have been inducted, the first being Senegalese writer and statesman Léopold Sédar Senghor in 1983.

In 2020, to mark his 35 years of writing, the Quartier des spectacles produced the large-scale exhibition Cœur nomade, based on his hand-drawn books. The City of Montreal adopted this poetic name for the first Coeur-nomade Library, created in tribute to his exceptional career and as a legacy for the community. Artist Roger Langevin donated a monumental sculpture of Laferrière to Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. It was installed in the Art Garden, near his mural. The exhibition travelled to several cities, including Tunis, Frankfurt, and Dubai, and was also presented in the delegates’ entrance at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, on the Pont des Arts in Paris (between the Louvre and the Académie française), and on the forecourt of the Institut de France.

In 2021, his wax likeness is also on display at the Musée Grévin in Paris, where he is portrayed seated in an armchair, a book in hand, in conversation with Bernard Pivot, the renowned French literary journalist and television host.

In 2023, Adam Leith Gollner published Working in the Bathtub: Conversations with the Immortal Dany Laferrière, a collection of interviews with Laferrière, some of which were originally published in The Paris Review.

Awards and honors

National orders

Commander of the Legion of Honour

Officer of the Order of Canada (2015)

Officer of the National Order of Quebec (2014)

Cultural orders and distinctions

Grand Officer of the Ordre de la Pléiade

Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters (France)

Companion of the Order of Arts and Letters (Quebec)

Knight of the Order of Cultural Merit (Monaco)

Medal of the Order of Francophones of America

Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal

Mérite du français dans la culture (Quebec)

Honorary Member of the Académie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts de Bordeaux

Honorary Member of the Académie de Nîmes

Honorary doctorates

Honorary Doctorate, École normale supérieure de Lyon (2010)

Honorary Doctorate, Paris-Sorbonne University and Pierre and Marie Curie University

Honorary Doctorate, McGill University

Honorary Doctorate, Middlebury College

Honorary Doctorate, Simon Fraser University

Honorary Doctorate, University of Ottawa

Honorary Doctorate, Université du Québec à Montréal

Literary awards

Governor General's Literary Award, for English-language translation, Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex?, 1994

Governor General’s Literary Award, for Je suis fou de Vava (Canada, 2006)

Prix Médicis, for The Return. (France, 2009)

The Grand Prix du livre de Montréal, for The Return.

The Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix for his body of work