Alain Mabanckou

Alain Mabanckou was born in 1966 in Congo-Brazzaville (French Congo). He currently resides in Los Angeles, where he teaches literature at UCLA, having previously spent four years at the University of Michigan. Mabanckou will be a Fellow in the Humanities Council at Princeton University in 2007-2008. One of Francophone Africa's most prolific contemporary writers, he is the author of six volumes of poetry and six novels. He received the Sub-Saharan Africa Literary Prize in 1999 for his first novel, Blue-White-Red, the Prize of the Five Francophone Continents for Broken Glass, and the Prix Renaudot in 2006 for Memoirs of a Porcupine. He was selected by the French publishing trade journal Lire as one of the fifty writers to watch out for in the coming century. His most recent book is African Psycho.Christine Schwartz Hartley is the translator of African Psycho. The former deputy editor of Art + Auction magazine is a freelance editor, translator, and writer based in Paris and Brooklyn. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Village Voice, Interior Design, and Elle Decor, among other publications. French-born, she holds a licence s-lettres (English) from the Universit Paris IVSorbonne, a diploma from the Institut dEtudes Politiques de Paris, and a masters in journalism from New York University.