SHENAZ PATEL
© Thomas Langdon
Shenaz Patel is a journalist and writer from the island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean.
She has published four novels, numerous short stories in French and Mauritian Creole, three plays, three graphic novels, four children's books. She was awarded the Grand Literary Prize of the Indian and Pacific Ocean (Paris) in 2007 for her novel Le silence des Chagos, which tells about the plight of the Chagossian people, expelled from their archipelago to enable the United States to build one of their main military bases. The English translation was published in 2019 by Restless Books, New York.
She was an IWP (International Writers Program) Honorary Fellow in the U.S. in 2016, a fellow at City of Asylum, Pittsburgh the same year, and has completed a research and writing fellowship at Harvard University in 2018, under the aegis of the Hutchins Centre / W.E.B du Bois Institute.
Shenaz Patel likes to define herself as an explorer. "Try to unearth the untold, the unsaid, approach our secret humanity, dig deeper into things and people's lives, with the broken but stubborn nails of words" : this is what she pursues through her writings. Attached as much to the interiority of the individual as to the way they relate to a particular social and political context. Nurturing the voluntary utopia that writing could change the world...
BOOKS
by Louis Timagène Houat
Translated from the French by Aqiil Gopee with Jeffrey Diteman
Introduced by Shenaz Patel (translated by Lisa Ducasse)
The first English translation of a rediscovered classic, and the only known novel by Black abolitionist and political exile Louis Timagène Houat, The Maroons is a fervid account of slavery and escape on nineteenth-century Réunion Island.
Paperback ISBN: 9781632063557
Publication date: February 20, 2024