“I was drawn to their activism and commitment to human rights. While his mother, a devoted reader, had nurtured his love of a wide range of French and African authors, at university he became fixated with the 18th-century “Lumières,” the humanist Enlightenment movement led by the likes of Voltaire and Denis Diderot. “I didn’t experience my two cultural identities as a source of conflict.”ĭiop moved back to Paris after finishing high school to study literature. I received a lot of love from both sides,” he said. “I was lucky that my French and Senegalese families both acted very warmly toward my parents. Alice Zeniter met with similar acclaim for “ The Art of Losing,” a multigenerational novel set during and after the Algerian war for independence, which was translated into English by Frank Wynne and published in the United States in March, also by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. “At Night All Blood Is Black” has also contributed to a reckoning with colonial history in French fiction. The winner will be announced on Wednesday.

The English-language version of “At Night All Blood Is Black,” translated by Anna Moschovakis, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in November and is now a finalist for this year’s International Booker Prize. Diop, 55, won several awards, including the Goncourt des Lycéens, a sister prize to the prestigious Goncourt that is voted on by high school students. Since its release in France in 2018, “At Night All Blood Is Black” has helped fill the void.

“It made me want to write a fictional letter from a Senegalese soldier.” “It felt unsatisfying, because in Senegal, we knew what they’d done for France,” Diop, a professor of 18th-century literature at the University of Pau in southwestern France, said in an interview this month. PARIS - As a child, the Senegalese-French author David Diop was used to seeing soldiers not unlike Alfa Ndiaye, the narrator of his novel “ At Night All Blood Is Black.” In Senegal, men who had fought for France in the two world wars often took part in national parades, yet when Diop started reading letters by French soldiers, infantrymen from colonized African countries were nowhere to be found.

How to say blood in french